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I UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



POISON PEOBLEM 



OR THE CA USE AND CURE OF 
INTEMPERANCE 



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FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. 

AUTHOR OF " PHYSICAL EDUCATION," ''HOUSEHOLD REMEDIES," ETC. 



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M Light is Help from Above. 1 '— G. E. Lesstng. 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1887 



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Copyright, 1886, 
Br D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



All rights reserved. 



PEEFAOE. 



"What shall we do to be saved?" is a question 
which must force itself upon the thoughts of all who 
believe in the correlation of health and happiness, 
when they reflect upon the facts established by the 
North American and West European statistics of in- 
temperance. In Great Britain the consumption of 
fermented and distilled liquors has increased since 
1850 at the average yearly rate of three and one third 
per cent ; in France, two per cent ; in Switzerland, 
five and a half per cent ; in northern Germany (in- 
cluding Saxony and Alsace-Lorraine) the manufacture 
of malt liquors has doubled since 1866 ; and even in 
the United States the consumption of intoxicating 
drinks of all kinds has advanced at a rate exceeding 
that of our rapid growth in population by one fifth. 
In Norway, Poland, Galicia, and the Danubian prin- 
cipalities, the production of distilled liquors is the 
only growing branch of industry; and in European 
Turkey the habitual use of alcoholic stimulants is no 
longer confined to the trinitarian subjects of the sul- 
tan. Since the harvest-time of 1873, while Ireland 
and eastern Brazil were struggling with famine, and 
thousands of our fellow men in Persia, Armenia, Cash- 



4 PHEFACE. 

mere, and Greenland actually died for want of bread, 
between 390,000,000 and 400,000,000 tons of bread- 
stuffs have been converted from a blessing into a 
curse. In England and Scotland alone the produc- 
tion of alcoholic drinks has consumed half a billion 
bushels of cereals, every handful of which has strewn 
the path of coming generations with the seeds of mis- 
ery and disease. 

The pious belief that the excess of every social 
evil tends to insure its abolition, seems, indeed, to have 
been almost disproved by the history of the alcohol 
habit. When the yoke of despots had made deliver- 
ance more desirable than life itself, despotism had 
reached the term of its power. When the rule of 
priests had made the hatred of shams burn hotter 
than the fire of the stake, no Jesuitical intrigues could 
prevent the triumph of the Protestant revolt. But, 
though the evil of intemperance has long been recog- 
nized as the blighting curse of modern civilization, 
the sore-felt need of relief seems thus far to have re- 
vealed no remedy. In spite of all our philanthropists 
have done to stem or deflect the current, the Gift- 
quelle, the dire poison-fountain of social life, has over- 
flowed its ancient banks, and threatens to submerge 
the sanitaria of the primitive highlands. In coun- 
tries of Christendom where the ebb of all other in- 
dustries has enforced a degree of frugality unknown 
to the revival periods of mediaeval asceticism, the 
liquor traffic still swells the tide of revenue and dis- 
ease. Remedy after remedy has been proposed, tested, 
and changed for another, doomed to a similar failure. 

And yet the general tendency of those changes 



PREFACE. 5 

reveals an advance in the right direction. Philoso- 
phers have long thought it probable that the histo- 
rians of the future will deal with the records of legis- 
lative reforms rather than with the bulletins of battles 
and bombardments, and the value of such records in 
characterizing the spirit of the age is strikingly illus- 
trated by the chronicle of temperance legislation. 
The necessity of controlling the grosser excesses of 
intemperance was always more or less recognized, 
but until lately the efforts to that purpose were di- 
rected to the suppression of the symptoms rather 
than to the removal of the cause. There was a time 
when the belief in the necessity of alcoholic stimu- 
lation would have proved a wholly unassailable axiom, 
even if legislators could have been induced to waste 
their time on such secular vanities as the preservation 
of health. It was the millennium of madness, when 
the promotion of sanitary habits was thought of far 
less importance than the enforcement of insane cere- 
monies ; when the images of miracle-mongers lodged 
in gilded domes while the image of God rotted in a 
hovel ; when men were tortured to death for whisper- 
ing a doubt against the pretensions of their spiritual 
taskmasters, but were freely permitted to poison them- 
selves and their neighbors with spirituous abomina- 
tions. In that golden age of antiphysical doctrines, 
temperance had no chance whatever. Cavaliers and 
commoners vied in " wassail " ; nay, the moral exem- 
plars of Christendom outguzzled the thirstiest lay- 
men: 

" O monachi, vestri stomachi sunt amphorae Bacchi, 
Vos estis, Deus est testis, turpissima pestis," 



6 PREFACE. 

rhymed Ulric Hutten, and there is no doubt that for 
centuries every large convent had a private wine-cel- 
lar. The monastery of Weltenburg, on the Danube, 
operated the largest brewery of the German Empire, 
and thousands of prelates owned both breweries and 
vineyards. Spiritual tyranny and spirituous license 
went hand in hand. Yet, even then, communities 
had to legislate against the bestial abuse of that li- 
cense ; and there were voluntary friends of temper- 
ance, men of higher ideals, scholars and philanthro- 
pists, who abhorred drunken riots, though they loved 
their wine, and recommended a self-denial which they 
found often more easy to preach than to practice. 
Their motto was "Moderation." Be temperate in 
all things. Keep the safe middle course. 

A dangerous fallacy lurks in those precepts. It 
may be safe to compromise conflicting duties, as chari- 
ty and economy, patriotism and domestic obligations ; 
but where is the golden mean of virtue and vice? 
How keep a safe middle course on the slippery road 
to ruin ? After opening the flood-gate, not one man 
in a thousand can stay the progress of a besetting vice, 
and of all besetting vices the alcohol habit is the 
most inevitably progressive. An unnatural appetite 
has no natural limits. For weeks, sometimes for 
months, young topers have to struggle against the 
protests of a better instinct, but the final surrender 
of that monitor marks the incipience of a morbid 
craving, which every gratification makes only more 
exorbitant. For, by and by the jaded organism fails 
to respond to the spur ; the stimulant palls, but the 
hankering for stimulation remains, and the toper has 



PREFACE. 7 

tb satisfy his thirst either by increasing the quantum 
of his tipple or by resorting to stronger poisons. 
After kindling the •flames of alcoholism it is in vain 
to urge the advantage of a moderate conflagration ; 
one might as well recommend a moderate use of the 
privilege to ignite a barrel of gunpowder. We can 
not tolerate the use of intoxicants and hope to prevent 
intoxication. 

The lessons of experience, if not of physiology, 
gradually taught the friends of temperance to relin- 
quish that hope. A strong party of the Reform 
League declared in favor of total abstinence from al- 
coholic beverages, and devised plans for the effective 
propaganda of their tenets. They doubted the ex- 
pediency of coercion in " a matter of private habits," 
but shrank from no sacrifice in braving the odium of 
personal intolerance, in advocating their principles in 
public lectures, in printing and distributing millions 
of eloquent pamphlets. Their own habits were gen- 
erally distinguished by a strict conformity to their 
principles. They hoped to cure the alcohol-habit by 
illustrating in theory and practice the advantages of 
uncompromising abstinence. Their motto was " Re- 
pudiation." 

A good deal of learning has lately been paraded 
in demonstrating the legal necessity of distinguishing 
between crimes and vices, between direct and indirect 
offences against the statutes of the moral code. But 
the recognized interests of public welfare have al- 
ways been pursued across the boundaries of such dis- 
tinctions; or, more properly speaking, the varying 
definitions of good and evil have ever biased the pre- 



8 PREFACE. 

vailing theories as to the proper sphere of legislation. 
When the eternal welfare of millions was supposed 
to depend on their conformity to certain mysterious 
dogmas, and the degradation of the body was thought 
to be rather conducive to spiritual advantages, it 
seemed perfectly logical to give a health-destroying 
habit free rein and curb the freedom of conscience. 
Those theories have since been greatly modified ; but 
that modern moralists hesitate to coerce rum-sellers 
and hasten to coerce gamblers and the venders of un- 
clean literature, means, after all, nothing else but that 
they are still inclined to consider intemperance, on 
the whole, a lesser evil than a passion for gaming or 
lascivious novels. Is that bias a relic of the times , 
when the natural temptations of the sexual instinct 
were dreaded more than the unnatural temptations 
of the poison-vice, and the financial resources of a 
tithe-paying Christian were thought of more impor- 
tance than his health ? Judging from secular stand- 
ards, we should be inclined to think that alcohol is 
doing more mischief in a single year than obscene 
literature has done in a century. And, while game- 
sters may be indemnified by an occasional gain, 
there is no doubt that the passion of the toper in- 
volves the inevitable loss of time, money, and repu- 
tation, as well as of health. And, unhappily, it also 
involves the loss of self-respect, and thus destroys 
the basis on which the advocate of appeals to the 
moral instinct would found his plan of salvation. 
The power of moral resistance is weakened with 
every repetition of the poison-dose, and we might 
as well besiege a bed-ridden consumptive with ap- 



PREFACE. 9 

peals to resume liis place at the head of an afflicted 
family. 

Nor can the purposes of prohibitive legislation 
be furthered by compromise measures. We must 
banish alcohol from the sick-room as well as from the 
banquet-hall. Dr. N. S. Davis, ex-President of the 
American Medical Association, confesses to having 
found " no case of disease, and no emergency arising 
from accident, that could not be treated more success- 
fully without any form of fermented or distilled liquor 
than with." Dr. James E. Nichols, editor of the 
Boston " Journal of Chemistry," records his convic- 
tions that " the banishment of alcohol would not de- 
prive us of a single one of the indispensable agents 
which modern civilization demands." "In no in- 
stance," he adds, " of disease in any form, is it a medi- 
cine which might not be dispensed with and other 
agents substituted." Then why, for mankind's sake, 
not confine ourselves to such substitutes ? Have the 
experiments of homoeopathy not abundantly proved 
that the disorders of the human organism can be 
cured, not only as well, but more easily and more per- 
manently, without the use of any drastic stimulants 
whatever ? Is it not mere mockery to prohibit the 
sale of small beer, and permit any enterprising dis- 
tiller to deluge the country with poison by selling his 
brandy as a " digestive tonic," and elude the inconven- 
ience of the Sunday law by consigning his liquor to 
a drug-store? Wherever the laboring-classes find a 
chance for healthier recreations the army of topers 
would die out from want of recruits, if the causes of 
intemperance were limited to the temptations of the 



10 PREFACE. 

rum-shop, with its garish, splendor and its sham prom- 
ises of social pleasures. But the tempter comes in 
more subtle disguises. The elixirs of death are sold 
as panaceas. " Brandy-doctors," as Benjamin Bush 
used to call them, abuse the confidence of their pa- 
tients by inoculating them with the seeds of a life- 
blighting vice. Thousands of topers owe their ruin 
to a prescription of " tonic-bitters." In many of our 
smaller cities drug-stores, rather than coffee-houses and 
beer-gardens, have become the preparatory schools of 
the rum-shop. 

Taught by the logic of such experiences, the 
friends of reform will at last recognize the truth, that 
the " temperate use " of alcohol is but the first stage 
of a progressive and shame-proof disease, and that, 
moderation and repudiation failing, we must direct 
our blows at the root of the upas tree and adopt the 
motto of "Eradication." Truce means defeat in the 
struggle against an evil that will reproduce its seed 
from the basis of any compromise. The removal of 
the cause is easier than the suppression of the symp- 
toms, by just as much as abstinence is easier than tem- 
perance. 

Felix L. Oswald. 

Tallulah, Ga., October, 1886, 



COSTTEl^TS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL-HABIT. 

PAGE 

A physiological enigma — Origin of the poison-vice — All evil abnor- 
mal — God made man upright — Protective instincts — A popular 
fallacy— The key of the enigma — Unnatural habits — The secret 
of their persistence — Every poison can become a second nature — 
u Mild stimulants " — Claude Bernard's discovery — Tea and coffee 
— Tobacco — Small-beer — The road to ruin paved with so-called 
temperance drinks — Cider and beer — Suggestive statistics — A 
lesson from Nature— Total abstinence the only safe plan . . 13 

CHAPTER II. 

THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 

The exegesis of vice — Antiquity of the poison-habit— Wine probably 
the first stimulant — Haller's conjecture — National poisons — A 
suggestive fact — Interchangeable vices — Narcotics and alcoholic 
drinks — Identical in their essential effects — Self-deceptions — An 
ethnological conjecture — Predisposing causes ot intemperance — 
A radical misconception — Oriental tipplers — Soma-juice — Opium 
— Hydromel — Koumiss — Chinese topers — A sensible proposition 
— Poisonous mushrooms — Moral influences — The war against 
Nature — Asceticism — An open secret 28 

CHAPTER III. 

PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF THE POISON-HABIT. 

The stimulant vice — History of human degeneration — Half-made men 
— Effects of the alcohol- vice — Upon savages — Upon civilized men 
— Alcohol epidemics — Indigestion — The after-effects of intoxica- 
tion — Daily poison doses — Predisposing causes of disease — Lon- 
gevity — Physical degeneration — Ancient athletes — Hereditary 
transmissions — Insanity statistics — Shah Nahum's secret— Ab- 
stinent nations — Turks and Nubians — Their physical vigor — 
Topers' sophistry — " Climatic influences " — Suggestive facts — 
The age of confirmed habits — Rousseau's climacteric . . .44 



12 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE COSTS OF INTEMPERANCE. 

PAGE 

Increase of the poison-habit — Statistics of intemperance — Suicidal 
vices — Eum and crime — A political economist's estimate — Turn- 
ing breadstuff's into poison — Stimulants and narcotics — New poi- 
sons — Nature's ultimatum — " Tolerance " — The indirect costs of 
the poison-habit — Lager beer — Startling facts — The poison-habit 
in all its forms an unmixed evil — Sophisms of the compromise 
plan 64 

CHAPTER V. 

ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 

Obsolete doctrines — Theory and practice — Untenable dogmas — Our 
medical text- books — Practical tests — The lessons of homoeopathy 
— A medical dilemma — Obstinate facts — The safest way — An ugly 
alternative — Dr. Sewall's argument — Medical prescriptions as a 
cause of alcoholism — Rekindling smothered fires — Isaac Jen- 
nings's appeal — Dr. Mussey's case— A last resort — Alcohol dis- 
pensable — Safest substitutes — A crucial test — The physiological 
action of alcohol — Dr. N. S. Davis's definition . . . .78 

CHAPTER VI. 

PROHIBITION. 

The problem of ages — History of the temperance movement — Zoro- 
aster, Pythagoras, Mohammed — The sphere of legislation — Vices 
and crimes — Varying definitions of crime — Prevention easier 
than suppression — Magnitude of the evil — The poison-traffic not 
a self-correcting abuse — Lesser evils — Efficacy of prohibitive 
legislation — Prohibition in Sweden — Local experience — Mayor 
Hamlin's testimony — The price of success 91 

CHAPTER VH. 

SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. 

Educational reforms— Futility of half-way measures— Total absti- 
nence — Temperate nations — Spain under the Saracens — Instruc- 
tion — Temperance text-books — Lecture bureaus — Chances of co- 
operation — Pamphlets and tracts — Conditions of Success — Pro- 
scription — A social remedy — Healthier pastimes — A lesson from 
history — The Olympic games — The pleasure resorts — A lesser 
evil — Reform fallacies — Saturday afternoon — Half-holidays — 
Temperance gardens — Gymnasia — Physical education— A sug- 
gestion — Health the means, as well as the end, of temperance — 
Prospects— Regenesis 105 

Appendix 121 



THE POISON PROBLEM. 



CHAPTEE I. 

THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 
" Consistency is the test of truth." — Wilberforee. 

Among the strange legends of the middle ages 
there are certain traditions which have evidently a 
figurative significance, and whose origin has often 
been traced to the allegorical mythology of an earlier 
age. An allegory of that sort is the legend of the 
" Marvel of Nikolsburg," near Yienna ; a miraculous 
image that appeared always an inch higher than the 
person standing before it. " It overtopped a giant, 
and all but condescended to the stature of a dwarf ^" 
says the tradition. 

That image is a symbol of Nature. The lowest 
savage must dimly recognize the fact that man can 
not measure his cunning against the wisdom of the 
Creator, and the highest development of science has 
only revealed its own incompetence to imitate, or even 
comprehend, the structural perfection of the simplest 
living organism. The Author of life deals only in 
masterpieces ; the marvelous fitness of his contrivances 



14 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

is as infinite in his smallest as in his greatest works, 
and the apparent exceptions from that rule can nearly 
all be traced to the influence of abnormal circum- 
stances. Our own interference with the order of 
Nature has caused the discords in the harmony of 
creation which furnish the chief arguments of pes- 
simism. The winter torrents which devastate the 
valleys of Southern France with a fury which Con- 
dorcet calls the "truculence of a vainly worshiped 
heaven," flowed in harmless brooks till the hand of 
man destroyed the protecting forests that absorbed 
and equalized the drainage of the Alpine slopes ; the 
same imprudence has turned the gardens of the East 
into deserts, and obstructed with sand-bars the chan- 
nels of once navigable rivers. The wanton exter- 
mination of wood-birds has revenged itself by insect 
plagues. Consumption, that cruel scourge of the hu- 
man race, is the direct consequence of the folly which 
makes us prefer the miasma of our tenement prisons 
to the balm of God's free air. We are too apt to con- 
found the results of our sins against Nature with the 
original arrangements of Providence. But the strang- 
est instance of that mistake is the fallacy which has 
long biased our dealings with the curse of the alcohol 
habit. Drunkards plead their inability to resist the 
promptings of an imperious appetite. Their friends 
lament the antagonism of nature and duty, the weak- 
ness of the flesh frustrating the resolves of a willing 
spirit. Even temperance orators dwell on the dangers 
of "worldly temptations," of " selfish, sensual indul- 
gences," as if the alcohol habit were the result of an 
innate propensity — deplorable in its collateral conse- 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 15 

quences, but withal entitled to the compromising con- 
cessions which ascetic virtue owes to the cravings of 
an impetuous natural instinct. In other words, we 
palliate a flagrant crime against the physical laws of 
God, as if Nature herself had lured us to our ruin ; 
the votaries of alcohol plead their ignorance, as if the 
Providence that warns us against the sting of a tiny 
insect, and teaches the eye to protect itself against a 
mote of dust, had provided no adequate safeguards 
against the greatest danger to health and happiness. 

And yet those safeguards would abundantly an- 
swer their protective purpose if persistent vice had 
not almost deadened the faculty of understanding the 
monitions of our physical conscience. It is true that 
the stimulant-thirst of the confirmed drunkard far 
exceeds the urgency of the most impetuous instincts; 
but by that very excessiveness and persistence the far- 
gone development of the alcohol habit proves what 
the mode of its incipience establishes beyond the pos- 
sibility of a doubt — namely, the radical difference of 
its characteristics from those of a natural appetite. 
For— 

1. Under normal circumstances the attractive- 
ness of alimentary substances is proportioned to the 
degree of their healthfulness and their nutritive 
value. To the children of Nature all hurtful things 
are repulsive, all beneficial things attractive. Provi- 
dence has endowed our species with a liberal share of 
the protective instinct that teaches our dumb fellow- 
creatures to select their proper food, and even in this 
age of far-gone degeneration the dietetic predilections 
of children and primitive men might furnish the cri- 



16 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

teria of a general food-reform. No creature is misled 
by an innate craving for unwholesome food, nor by 
an instinctive aversion to wholesome substances. Our 
natural repugnance to nearly all kinds of " medicines," 
i. e., virulent stimulants, has already begun to be rec- 
ognized as a suggestive illustration of that rule. A 
child's hankering after sweetmeats is only an appar- 
ent exception, for, as Dr. Schrodt observes, the con- 
ventional diet of our children is so deficient in saccha- 
rine elements that instinct constantly strives to supply 
an unsatisfied want. Human beings fed chiefly on 
fruit-syrups would instinctively hanker after farina- 
ceous substances. The savages of our northwestern 
prairies are as fond of honey as their grizzly neigh- 
bors. Nurslings, deprived of their mothers' milk, 
instinctively appreciate the proper component parts 
of artificial surrogates. Sailors in the tropics thirst 
after fruit, after refrigerating fluids, after fresh vege- 
tables. In the arctic seas they crave calorific food — 
oil or fat. 

But in no climate of this earth is man afflicted 
with an instinctive hankering after alcohol. To the 
palate of an unseduced boy rum is as repulsive as cor- 
rosive sublimate. I do not speak only of the sons of 
nature-abiding parents, but of the children of vice, 
left to the guidance of their enfeebled but not inten- 
tionally perverted instincts. The intuitive bias even 
of such is in the direction of total abstinence from all 
noxious stimulants, for Nature has willed that all her 
creatures should begin the pilgrimage of life from 
beyond the point where the roads of purity and vice 
diverge. In their projects for the abolition of the 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 17 

stimulant habit, temperance people are, indeed, rather 
inclined to underrate the difficulties of a total cure of 
a confirmed poison-vice, but equally apt to overrate 
the difficulty of total prevention. The supposed ef- 
fects of an innate predisposition can generally be 
traced to the direct influence of a vicious education. 
Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed his conviction that 
a fondness for intoxicating liquors is nearly always 
contracted in the years of immaturity, when the def- 
erence to social precedents is apt to overcome the 
warnings of instinct ; but that those who have escaped 
or not yielded to the temptations of that period would 
ever afterward be safe. Dr. Zimmerman, too, admits 
that " home influences are too often mistaken for he- 
reditary influences." And boy-topers are not always 
voluntary converts. The year before I left my native 
town (Brussels) I found a drunken lad on the platform 
of the railway-depot, and carried him to the house of 
a medical friend, who put him to bed and turned him 
over to a policeman the next morning. The little 
fellow was recognized as an old offender, but when 
the court was going to send him to a house of correc- 
tion my friend offered to take him back, and, on con- 
dition of keeping him away from his parents, was 
permitted to take care of him, and finally made him 
his office-boy. His parents were ascertained to be 
both habitual drunkards, but their son (aged eleven 
years) showed no inclination to follow their example, 
and voluntarily abstained from the light wines which 
now and then made their appearance on the doctor's 
table — though he never missed an opportunity to re- 
join his old playmates, and, as his patron expressed it, 



18 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

" was a dangerous deal too smart to be intrusted with 
the collection of bills." Six months after his last 
scrape I found him alone in the doctor's office, where 
he had collected a private library of picture-papers 
and illustrated almanacs. "What made you get so 
drunk last Easter ? " I asked him ; " are you so fond 
of brandy ? " 

" Nenni, mais pa m?en fit prendre" he replied — 
" father made me drink it." 

2. The instinctive aversion to any hind of poi- 
son can he perverted into an unnatural craving after 
the same substance. Poisons are either repulsive or 
insipid. Arsenic, sugar-of-lead, and antimony belong 
to the latter class. To the first-born children of earth 
certain mineral poisons were decidedly out-of-the-way 
substances, against which Nature apparently thought 
it less necessary to provide special safeguards. But, 
though less repulsive than other poisons, such sub- 
stances are never positively attractive, and often (like 
verdigris, potassium, etc.) perceptibly nauseous. Vege- 
table poisons are either nauseous or intensely bitter. 
Hasheesh is more unattractive than turpentine. Opium 
is acrid caustic. Absinthe (wormwood-extract) is as 
bitter as gall. Instinct resists the incipience of an 
insidious second nature. 

But that instinct is plastic. If the warnings of 
our physical conscience remain unheeded, if the offen- 
sive substance is again and again forced upon the un- 
willing stomach, Nature at last chooses the alternative 
of compromising the evil, and, true to her supreme 
law of preserving existence at any cost, prolongs even 
a wretched life by adapting the organism to the exi- 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 19 

gencies of an abnormal habit. She still continues her 
protest in the feeling of exhaustion which follows 
every poison-debauch, but permits each following dose 
of the insidious drug to act as a temporary rein vigor- 
ant, or at least as a spur to the functional activity of 
the exhausted organism ; for the apparent return of 
vital vigor is, in fact, nothing but a symptom of the 
morbid energy exerted by the system in its efforts to 
rid itself of a deadly intruder, for each new applica- 
tion of the stimulus is as regularly followed by a dis- 
tressing reaction. And only then the slave of the 
unnatural habit becomes conscious of that peculiar 
craving which is entirely distinct from the prompt- 
ings of a healthy appetite — a craving uncompromis- 
ingly directed toward a special, once repulsive, sub- 
stance; a craving defying the limiting instincts which 
indicate the proper quantum of wholesome foods and 
drinks ; a craving which each gratification makes more 
irresistible, though for the time being each indulg- 
ence is followed by a depressing reaction. The appe- 
tite for wholesome substances — however palatable — is 
never exclusive. A child may become passionately 
fond of ice-cream, yet accept cold water and fruit- 
cake as a welcome substitute. A predilection for 
honey, strawberries, or sweet tree fruits will not tempt 
the admirers of such dainties to commit forgery and 
highway robbery to indulge their penchant — so long 
as their kitchen affords a supply of savory vegeta- 
bles. Only natural appetites have natural limits ; the 
art of the best pastry-cook would hardly induce his 
customers to stupefy and bestialize themselves with 
his compounds. There are no milk-topers, no suicidal 



20 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

potato-eaters, no victims of a chronic porridge-passion. 
In spite of occasional surfeits, the craving for aliment- 
ary substances increases and decreases with the needs 
of the organism, while that of the poison-drinker 
yields only to the temporary extinction of conscious- 
ness. 

In a state of Nature every normal function is as- 
sociated with a pleasurable sensation, and, instead of 
resulting in agonizing reactions, a feast of wholesome 
food is followed by a state of considerable physical 
comfort — "the beatific consciousness of perfect di- 
gestion," as Baron Brisse describes the pleasures of 
the after-dinner hour. But no length of practice will 
ever save the poison-slave from the penalties of his 
sins against Nature. Each full indulgence is followed 
by a full measure of woful retributions, while a half- 
indulgence results in a half-depression to the verge of 
world-weary despondency, or fails to satisfy the lin- 
gering thirst after a larger dose of the same stimulant. 
And every poison known to modern chemistry can 
beget that specific craving. "Entirely accidental cir- 
cumstances, the accessibility of special drugs, imita- 
tiveness and the intercourse of commercial nations, 
the mere whims of fashion, the authority of medical 
recommendations, have often decided the first choice 
of a special stimulant, destined to become a national 
beverage" and a national curse. The contemporaries 
of the Veda-writers fuddled with soma-wine, the juice 
of a narcotic plant of the Himalaya foot-hills. Their 
neighbors, the pastoral Tartars, get drunk on koumiss, 
or fermented mare's-milk, an abomination which in 
Eastern Europe threatens to increase the list of irn- 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 21 

ported poisons, while opium is gaining ground in our 
Pacific States as fast as lager beer, chloral, and pat- 
ent "bitters " on the Atlantic slope. The French have 
added absinthe to their wines and liquors, the Turks 
hasheesh and opiates to strong coffee. North Ameri- 
ca has adopted tea from China, coffee from Arabia 
(or originally from Ceylon), tobacco from the Carib- 
bean savages, high-wines from France and Spain, and 
may possibly learn to drink Mexican aloe-sap, or chew 
the coca-leaves of the South American Indians. Ar- 
senic has its votaries in the southern Alps. Cinnabar 
and acetate of copper victimize the miners of the Pe- 
ruvian sierras. The Ashantees are so fond of sorghum 
beer that their chieftains have to keep special bamboo 
cages for the benefit of quarrelsome drunkards. The 
pastor of a Swiss colony in the Mexican state of 
Oaxaca told me that the mountaineers of that neigh- 
borhood befuddle themselves with cicuta synip, the 
inspissated juice of a kind of hemlock that first ex- 
cites and then depresses the cerebral functions, exces- 
sive garrulity being the principal symptom of the ex- 
alted stage of intoxication. A decoction of the com- 
mon fly-toadstool (agaricus maculatus) inflames the 
passions of the Kamtchatka natives, makes them pug- 
nacious, disputative, but eventually splenetic (Chamis- 
so's " Reisen," p. 322). The Abyssinians use a prepa- 
ration of dhurra corn that causes more quarrels than 
gambling. It is a favorite beverage at festivals, and 
is vaunted as a remedy for various complaints, though 
Belzoni mentions that it makes its votaries more sub- 
ject to the attacks of the Nile fever. According to 
Prof. Yambery, the Syrian Druses pray, though ap- 



22 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

parently in vain, to be delivered from the tempta- 
tion of foxglove tea. Comparative pathology has 
multiplied these analogies till, in spite of the argu- 
ments of a thousand specious advocates, there is no 
valid reasonto doubt that the alleged innate crav- 
ing for the stimulus of fermented or distilled bever- 
ages is wholly abnormal, and that the alcohol habit is 
characterized by all the peculiarities of a poison 
vice. 

3. All poison habits are progressive. There is a 
deep significance in that term of our language which 
describes an unnatural habit as growing upon its dev- 
otees, for we find, indeed, a striking analogy between 
the development of the stimulant habit and that of a 
parasitical plant, which, sprouting from tiny seeds, 
fastens upon, preys upon, and at last strangles its vic- 
tims. The seductiveness of every stimulant habit 
gains strength with each new indulgence, and it is a 
curious fact that that power is proportioned to the 
original repulsiveness of the poison. The tonic in- 
fluence of Chinese tea is due to the presence of a 
stimulating ingredient known as theine, in its concen- 
trated form a strong narcotic poison, but forming only 
a minute percentage of the component parts of com- 
mon green tea. On the Pacific coast of our country 
thousands of Chinese immigrants carry their thrift to 
the degree of renouncing their favorite beverage, but 
neither considerations of economy nor of self-preserva- 
tion will induce the same exiles to break the fetters of 
the opium habit. Not one hasheesh-eater in a hun- 
dred can hope to emancipate himself from the thral- 
dom of his vice. The guests of King Alcohol, too, 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 23 

would make their reckoning without their host in 
hoping to take in the fun of intoxication as a votary 
of pleasure would engage in a transient pastime : his 
palace is an Armida castle, that rarely dismisses a vis- 
itor. 

" In describing the effects of the alcohol habit," 
says Dr. Isaac Jennings, " I want to impress the reader 
with another feature of it — its perpetuity. It can 
never be put off during the lifetime of the individ- 
ual ; it may be covered up to appearance, but it can 
not be effaced. ... It seems to be a common impres- 
sion that alcohol circulates through the body, excites 
the action of the heart and liver, quickens and en- 
livens the animal spirits, and then passes off and leaves 
no trace of its visitation, or at most only a temporary 
loss of power, which is soon restored by a self-moved 
power-pump. This is a great and fundamental error. 
Every drop of alcohol that enters the stomach inflicts 
an injury that will continue as long as the old stock 
lasts, and reach even to the young sprouts. It may 
not be enstamped on them in precisely the same way, 
but it will affect essentially the same parts." (" Medi- 
cal Eeform," pp. 173-175.) 

"If a man were sent to hell," says Dr. Rush, "and 
kept there for a thousand years as a punishment for 
drinking, and then returned, his first cry would be, 
' Give me rum ! give me rum ! ' " 

"The infernal powers blindfold the victims of 
their altars," says Lessing, and the stimulant vice 
seems, in fact, to weaken not only the physical 
constitution of its votaries, but their moral power 
of resistance, and often even the faculty of real- 



24 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

izing the perils of their practice, as if the poison 
had struck its roots into the very souls of its vic- 
tims. 

But the alcohol habit grows outward, as well as 
inward. "We have seen that each gratification of the 
poison vice is followed by a depressing reaction. But 
this feeling of exhaustion is steadily progressive, and 
the correspondingly increased craving for a repetition 
of the stimulant dose forces its victim either to in- 
crease the quantity of the wonted tonic, or else to resort 
to a stronger poison. The experience of individual 
drunkards probably corresponds to the international 
development of the alcohol habit. Its first devotees 
contented themselves with moderate quantities of the 
milder stimulants — must, hydromel, and light beer. 
But such tonics soon began to pall, and the jaded ap- 
petite of the toper soon resorted to strong wines, to 
hard cider, and finally to brandy and rum. Others 
increased the quantity, and learned to drink horse- 
pails full of beer, in which "diluted and harmless 
form 5? many German students manage to absorb a 
quart of alcohol per day. (Appendix I.) 

"People sometimes wonder," says Dr. Jennings, 
" why such and such men, possessing great intellect- 
ual power and firmness of character in other respects, 
can not drink moderately and not give themselves up 
to drunkenness. They become drunkards by law — 
fixed, immutable law. Let a man with a constitution as 
perfect as Adam's undertake to drink alcohol, moder- 
ately and perseveringly, with all the caution and delib- 
erate determination that he can command, and if he 
could live long enough he would just as certainly be- 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 25 

come a drunkard — get to a point where lie could 
not refrain from drinking to excess — as he would 
go over Niagara Falls when placed in a canoe in 
the river above the falls and left to the natural oper- 
ation of the current. And proportionately as he 
descended the stream would his alcoholic attraction 
for it increase, so that he would find it more and 
more difficult to get ashore, until he reached a point 
where escape was impossible." (" Medical Reform, 55 
p. 176.) 

Now and then the votaries of the stimulant habit 
exchange their tonic for a stronger poison. Claude 
Bernard, the famous French pathologist, noticed that 
the opium vice recruits its female victims chiefly from 
the ranks of the veteran coffee drinkers. In Turkey, 
too, strong coffee has prepared the way for tobacco 
and opium. In Switzerland arsenic eaters have ex- 
changed their Tcirschwasser for a more potent tonic. 
Many French and Russian hard drinkers have learned 
to prefer ether to brandy. 

But no poison- vice can be cured by milder stimu- 
lants. The Beelzebub of alcohol does not yield to 
weaker spirits ; hence the fallacy of the antidote plan. 
Nothing was formerly more common with temperance 
people of the compromise school than to comfort con- 
verted drunkards with stimulating drugs and strong 
coffee, in the hope that the organism might somehow 
be induced to acquiesce in the quid pro qtco That 
hope is a delusion. The surrogate may bring a tem- 
porary relief, but it can not satisfy the thirst for the 
stronger tonic, and only serves to perpetuate the 
stimulant diathesis — the poison-hunger, which will 
3 



26 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

sooner or later revert to the wonted object of its pas- 
sion. Unswerving loyalty to the pledge of the total 
abstinence plan is not at first the easiest, but event- 
ually the surest way; for, even after weeks of suc- 
cessful resistance to the importunities of the tempter, 
a mere spark may rekindle the smothered flames. 
"What takes place in the stomach of a reformed 
drunkard?" says Dr. Sewall — "the individual who 
abandons the use of all intoxicating drinks? The 
stomach, by that extraordinary self-restorative power 
of Nature, gradually resumes its natural appearance. 
Its engorged blood-vessels become reduced to their 
original size, and a few weeks, or months, will accom- 
plish this renovation, after which the individual has 
no longer any suffering or desire for alcohol. It is 
nevertheless true, and should ever be borne in mind, 
that such is the sensibility of the stomach of the re- 
formed drunkard, that a repetition of the use of alco- 
hol in the slightest degree, and in any form, under 
any circumstances, revives the appetite; the blood- 
vessels again become dilated, and the morbid sensi- 
bility of the organ is reproduced." 

The use of any stimulating drug may re waken 
the dormant propensity, and it will not change the 
result if the stimulant has been administered in the 
form of a medical prescription. Strong drink is a 
mocker, in disease as well as in health, and the road 
to the rum-shop leads through the dispensary as often 
as through the beer garden. 

The logical conclusion of all these premises thus 
reveals the two-fold secret of the alcohol habit : the 
anomaly of its attractiveness and the necessity cf its 



THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 27 

progressiveness ; and we at last recognize the truth, 
that the road to intemperance is paved with mild 
stimulants, and that the only safe, consistent, and ef- 
fective plan of reform is total abstinence from all 
stimulating poisons. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 
"The discovery of the cause is the discovery of the remedy." — Bichat. 

The undoubted antiquity of the poison-vice has 
induced several able physiologists to assume the hy- 
gienic necessity of artificial stimulation. But the 
not less undoubted fact that there have been manful, 
industrious, and intelligent nations of total abstainers, 
would be an almost sufficient refutation of that infer- 
ence, which is sometimes qualified by the assertion 
that the tonic value of alcoholic drinks is based upon 
the abnormal demands upon the vitality of races ex- 
posed to the vicissitudes of a rigorous climate and the 
manifold overstraining influences of an artificial civili- 
zation. For it can, besides, be proved that the alleged 
invigorating action of alcoholic drinks is an absolute 
delusion, and the pathological records of contemporary 
nations establish the fact that endemic increase of in- 
temperate habits can nearly always be traced to causes 
that have no correlation whatever to the increased 
demands upon the physical or intellectual energies of 
the afflicted community. Potentially those energies 
have lamentably decreased among numerous races who 
once managed to combine nature-abiding habits with 
a plethora of vital vigor. 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 29 

The physiologically unavoidable progressiveness of 
all stimulant habits is a further argument in favor of 
the theory that the poison-vice has grown up from very 
small beginnings, and the genesis of the fatal germ 
has probably been supplied in the hypothesis of Fabio 
Colonna, an Italian naturalist of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. " Before people used wine," says he, ."they 
drank sweet must, and preserved it, like oil, in jars or 
skins. But in a warm climate a saccharine fluid is 
apt to ferment, and some avaricious housekeeper may 
have drunk that spoiled stuff till she became fond of 
it, and learned to prefer it to must." 

Avarice, aided perhaps by dietetic prurience, or 
indifference to the warnings of instinct, planted the 
baneful seed, and the laws of evolution did the rest. 

But the tendency of those laws has often been 
checked, and as certainly often been accelerated, by 
less uncontrollable agencies. 

The first venders of toxic stimulants (like our 
quack-medicine philanthropists) had a personal in- 
terest in disseminating the poison-habit. Reform 
attempts were met by appeals to the convivial inter- 
ests of the stimulant-dupe, by the seduction of minors, 
by charges of asceticism ; later, by nostrum puffs and 
opium wars. More than two thousand years ago the 
worship of Bacchus was propagated by force of arms. 
The disciples of Ibn Hanbal, the Arabian Father 
Mathew, were stoned in the streets of Bagdad. The 
persecutions and repeated expulsions of the Gre- 
cian Pythagoreans had probably a good deal to do 
with the temperance teachings of their master. In 
Palestine, in India, in mediaeval Europe, nearly every 



30 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

apostle of Nature had to contend with a rancorous 
opposition, inspired by the most sordid motives of 
self-interest, and our own age can in that respect not 
boast of much improvement. In spite of our higher 
standard of philanthropic principles, and their numer- 
ous victories in other directions, the heartless alliance 
of Bacchus and Mammon still stands defiant. In our 
own country a full hundred thousand men, not half of 
them entitled to plead the excuses of poverty or igno- 
rance, unblushingly invoke the protection of the laws 
in behalf of an industry involving the systematic prop- 
agation of disease, misery, and crime. Wherever the 
interests of the poison-traffic are at stake the nations 
of Europe have not made much progress, since the 
time when the sumptuary laws of Lorenzo de Medici 
were defeated by street riots and a shrieking proces- 
sion of the Florentine tavern-keepers. 

The efforts of such agitators are seconded by the 
instinct of imitation. " In large cities," says Dr. 
Schrodt, " one may see gamins under ten years grub- 
bing in rubbish heaps for cigar-stumps ; soon after, 
leaning against a board fence, groaning and shuddering 
as they pay the repeated penalty of Nature, yet, all the 
same, repeating the experiment with the resignation 
of a martyr. The rich, the fashionable, do it ; those 
whom they envy, smoke ; smoking, they conclude, 
must be something enviable." 

Without any intentional arts of persuasion, the 
Chinese business men of San Francisco have dissemi- 
nated a new poison-vice by smoking poppy-gum in the 
presence of their Caucasian employes, and accustoming 
them to associate the sight of an opium debauch with 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 31 

the idea of enjoyment and recreation. Would the 
opponents of prohibition attempt to deny that anal- 
ogous influences (the custom of "treating" friends 
at a public bar, the spectacle of lager-beer orgies in 
public gardens, etc.) have a great deal to do with the 
initiation of boy-topers ? 

Ignorance does not lead our dumb fellow-creatures 
to vicious habits, and prejudice is therefore, perhaps, 
the more correct name for the sad infatuation which 
tempts so many millions of our young men to defy 
the protests of instinct and make themselves the slaves 
of a life-destroying poison. Ignorance is nescience. 
Prejudice is malscience, miscreance, trust in erro- 
neous teachings. Millions of children are brought up 
in the belief that health can be secured only by abnor- 
mal means. A pampered child complains of headache, 
want of appetite. Instead of curing the evil by the 
removal of the cause, in the way so plainly indicated 
by the monitions of instinct, the mother sends to the 
drug-store. The child must " take something." Help 
must come through anti-natural means. A young 
rake,, getting more fretful and dyspeptic from day to 
day, is advised to " try something " — an aloe pill, a 
bottle of medicated brandy, any quack " specific," rec- 
ommended by its bitterness or nauseousness. The pro- 
tests of Nature are calmly disregarded in such cases. 
A dose of medicine, according to the popular impres- 
sion, can not be very effective unless it is very repul- 
sive. Our children thus learn to mistrust the voice of 
their natural instincts. They try to rely on the aid of 
specious arts, instead of trusting their troubles in the 
hands of Nature. Boys whose petty ailments have 



32 THE POISOX PROBLEM. 

been palliated with stimulants, will afterward be 
tempted to drown their sorrow in draughts of the 
same nepenthe, instead of biding their time, like 
Henry Thoreau, who preferred to "face any fate, 
rather than seek refuge in the mist of intoxication." 
Before the friends of temperance can hope for a radi- 
cal reform, they must help to eradicate the deep-rooted 
delusion of the stimulant fallacy — the popular error 
which hopes to defy the laws of Nature by the magic 
of intoxicating drugs, and thus secure an access of hap- 
piness not attainable by normal means. Our text- 
books, our public schools, should teach the rising gen- 
eration to realize the fact, that the temporary advantage 
gained by such means is not only in every case out- 
weighed by the distress of a speedy reaction, but that 
the capacity for enjoyment itself is impaired by its 
repeated abuse, till only the most powerful stimulants 
can restore a share of that cheerfulness which the 
spontaneous action of the vital energies bestows on 
the children of Nature. 

We have seen that the milder stimulants often 
form the stepping-stones to a passion for stronger 
poisons. A penchant for any kind of tonic drugs, 
nicotine, narcotic infusions, hasheesh, the milder opi- 
ates, etc., may thus initiate a stimulant habit with an 
unlimited capacity of development ; and there is no 
doubt that international traffic has relaxed the vigil- 
ance which helped our forefathers to guard their house- 
holds against the introduction of foreign poison-vices. 
Hence the curious fact that drunkenness is most preva- 
lent, not in the most ignorant or despotic countries 
(Russia, Austria, and Turkey), nor in southern Italy 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 33 

and Spain, where alcoholic drinks of the most seduc- 
tive kind are cheapest, but in the most commercial 
countries, western France, Great Britain, and North 
America. Hence also the fallacy of the brewer's ar- 
gument, that the use of lager beer would prevent the 
dissemination of the opium habit. No stimulant vice 
has ever prevented the introduction of worse poisons. 
Among the indirect causes of intemperance we must 
therefore include our mistaken toleration of the minor 
stimulant habits. The poison-vice has become a 
many-headed hydra, defying one-sided attacks, and it 
is no paradox to say that we could simplify our work 
of expurgation by making it more thorough. 

Polydipsia is a derangement of the digestive or- 
gans characterized by a chronic thirst, which forces 
its victims to swallow enormous quantities of stimulat- 
ing fluids. The biographer of Richard Porson, the 
great classic scholar, says that his poison-thirst was 
" so outrageous that he can not be considered a mere 
willful drunkard ; one must believe that he was driven 
into his excesses by some unknown disease of his con- 
stitution." .'.'." He would pour anything down 
his throat rather than endure the terrible torture of 
thirst. Ink, spirits of wine for the lamp, an embroca- 
tion, are among the horrible things he is reported to 
have swallowed in his extremity." Polydipsia is not 
always due to the direct or indirect (hereditary) influ- 
ence of the alcohol habit, and the origin of the dis- 
order was long considered doubtful ; but it has since 
been traced to a morbid condition of the kidneys, in- 
duced by the use of narcotic stimulants (tea, coffee, 
tobacco), but often also by gluttony. 



34 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

Like certain poison plants, the stimulant habit 
flourishes best in a sickly soil. Whatever tends to un- 
dermine the stamina of the physical or ?noral consti- 
tution^ helps to prepare the way for an inroad of 
intemperance, by weakening the resistance of the pro- 
tective instincts. Hence the notorious fact that gam- 
bling-dens and houses of ill-fame are rank hot-beds of 
the alcohol-vice. 

Asceticism has not yet ceased to be an indirect 
obstacle to the success of temperance reform. The 
children of Nature need no special holidays ; to them 
life itself is a festival of manifold sports. Hunting, 
fishing, and other pursuits of primitive nations become 
the pastimes of later ages. For the abnormal condi- 
tions of civilized life imply the necessity of providing 
special means of recreation, out-door sports, competi- 
tive gymnastics, etc., in order to satisfy the craving of 
an importunate instinct ; and too many social reform- 
ers have as yet failed to recognize the truth, that the 
suppression of that instinct avenges itself by its per^ 
version, by driving pleasure-seekers from the play- 
ground to the pot-house, as despotism has turned free- 
men into bandits and outlaws. " Every one who con- 
siders the world as it really exists," says Lecky, " must 
have convinced himself that in great towns, where 
multitudes of men of all classes and all characters are 
massed together, and where there are innumerable 
strangers, separated from all domestic ties and occu- 
pations, public amusements of an exciting order are 
absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is sim- 
ply to plunge an immense portion of the population 
into the lowest depths of vice." (Appendix II.) 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 35 

11 1 am a great friend to public amusements," says 
Boswell's Johnson, "for they keep people from vice." 
A home missionary in the character of a promoter of 
harmless recreations would double the popularity of 
our tenets, and, by vindicating our people against the 
charge of joy-hating bigotry, deprive our opponents of 
their most effective weapon. The free reading-rooms 
and gymnasiums of the New York Young Men's Asso- 
ciations have done more to promote the cause of tem- 
perance than the man-hunts of Sir Hudibras and all 
his disciples. We must change our tactics. "While 
our anchorite allies have contrived to make virtue re- 
pulsive, our opponents have proved themselves con- 
summate masters of the art of masking the ugliness of 
vice ; they have strewn their path with roses, and left 
us the thorns. Yet I hope to show that we can beat 
them upon their own ground, for it is not difficult to 
make health more attractive than disease. 

But the most obstinate obstacle to a successful prop- 
agation of total abstinence principles is the drug 
fallacy, a delusion founded on precisely the same error 
which leads the dram-drinker to mistake a process of 
irritation for a process of invigoration. During the 
infancy of the healing art all medical theories were 
biased by the idea that sickness is an enemy whose 
attacks must be repulsed a main forte, by suppressing 
the symptoms with fire, sword, and poison — not in the 
figurative but in the literal sense — the keystone dogma 
of the primitive Sangrados having been the following 
heroic maxim : " What drugs won't cure, must be cured 
with iron " (the lancet) ; " if that fails, resort to fire." 
(Quod medicamenta non cur ant ferrum cur at , quod 



36 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

non curat ferram ignis curat.) But with the progress 
of the physiological sciences the conviction gradually 
gained ground that disease itself is a reconstructive 
process, and that the suppression of the symptoms re- 
tards the accomplishment of that reconstruction. And 
ever since that truth dawned upon the human mind 
the use of poison drugs has steadily decreased. A 
larger and larger number of intelligent physicians had 
begun to suspect that the true healing art consists in 
the removal of the cause, and that where diseases have 
been caused by unnatural habits, the reform of those 
habits is a better plan than the old counter-poison 
method ; when homoeopathy proved practically (though 
not theoretically) that medication can be entirely dis- 
pensed with. The true effect of the more virulent 
drugs (opium, tartar emetic, arsenic, etc.) was then 
studied from a physiological standpoint, and experi- 
ments proved what the medical philosopher Asclepia- 
des conjectured eighteen hundred years ago, namely, 
that if a drugged patient recovers, the true explanation 
is that his constitution was strong enough to overcome 
both the disease and the drug. Bichat, Schrodt, Ma- 
gendie, Alcott, R. T. Trail, Isaac Jennings, and Dio 
Lewis arrived at the conclusion that every disease is a 
protest of Nature against some violation of her laws, 
and that the suppression of the symptoms means to si- 
lence that protest instead of removing its cause ; so that 
we might as well try to extinguish a fire by silencing 
the fire-bells, or to cure the sleepiness of a weary child 
by pinching its eyelids — in short, that drastic drugs, 
instead of " breaking up " a disease, merely interrupt 
it, and lessen the chance of a radical cure. 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 37 

Are there reasons to suppose that alcohol, or any 
other poison, makes an exception from that general 
rule ? We must reject the idea in toto, and I hope to 
show that it is refuted : 

1. By the testimony of our instincts. 

2. By experience. 

3. By the direct or indirect concessions of the 
ablest physiologists. 

Our instincts protest against medication. Against 
ninety-nine of a hundred " remedial drugs " our sense 
of taste warns us as urgently as against rotten eggs, 
verdigris, or oil of vitriol. Shall we believe that 
Nature repudiates the means of salvation? or that 
our protective instincts forsake us in the hour of our 
sorest need — in the hour of our struggle with a life- 
endangering disease? And the same instincts that 
protest against other poisons warn us against all kinds 
of alcoholic drugs. Is it an exception to that rule 
that the depraved taste of a drunkard may relish a 
glass of medicated wine, or a bottle of " Hostetter's 
Bitters " (rye brandy) ? If it is certain beyond all 
limits of doubt that the health of the stoutest man is 
no safeguard against the bane of the wretched poison, 
shall we believe that he can encounter it with impu- 
nity when his vital strength is exhausted by disease ? 

Has the stimulus of alcoholic beverages any re- 
medial or prophylactic effect? How does alcohol 
counteract the contagion of climatic fevers ? In pre- 
cisely the same way as those fevers arrest, or rather 
suspend, the progress of other disorders. The vital 
process can not compromise with two diseases at the 
6ame time. A fit of gastric spasms interrupts a tooth- 



38 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

ache. A toothache relieves a sick -headache. The 
severest cold in the head temporarily yields to an 
attack of small-pox. Temporarily r , I say, for the ap- 
parent relief is only a postponement of an interrupted 
process. During the progress of the alcohol fever 
(the feverish activity of the organism in its effort to 
rid itself of a life-endangering poison) Nature has to 
suspend her operations against a less dangerous foe. 
But each repetition of that factitious fever is followed 
by a reaction that suspends the prophylactic effect of 
the stimulus, and sooner or later the total exhaustion 
of the vital energies not only leaves the system at 
the mercy of the original foe, but far less able to re- 
sist his attacks. "There is but one appalling con- 
clusion to be deduced from hospital records, medical 
statistics, and the vast array of facts which bear upon 
the subject," says Prof. Youmans ; " it is, that among 
no class of society are the ravages of contagious dis- 
eases so wide-spread and deadly as among those who 
are addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages." 

Is alcohol a digestive tonic ? Can we cure an in- 
digestion by the most indigestible of all chemical 
products ! If a starving man drops by the roadside., 
we may get him on his legs by drenching him with 
a pailful of vitriol, but after rushing ahead for a few 
hundred steps he will drop again, more helpless than 
before, by just as much as the brutal stimulus has 
still further exhausted his little remaining strength. 
Thus alcohol excites, and eventually tenfold exhausts, 
the vigor of the digestive system. "We can not bully 
Nature. We can not silence her protests by a fresh 
provocation. Fevers can be cured by refrigeration ; 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 39 

indigestions by fasting and exercise ; and, at any rate, 
the possible danger of a relapse is infinitely prefer- 
able to the sure evils of the poison-drug. A few 
repetitions of the stimulant process may initiate the 
alcohol- vice and sow the seeds of a life-long crop of 
woe and misery. A single dose of alcoholic tonics 
may revive the fatal passion of half-cured drunkards, 
and forfeit their hard-earned chance of recovery. 
That chance, and life itself, often depend on the hope 
of guarding the system against a relapse of the stimu- 
lant-fever, and I would as soon snatch a plank from 
a drowning man as that last hope from a drunkard. 

Alcohol lingers in our hospitals as slavery lingers 
in South America, as torture lingers in the courts of 
eastern Europe. Quacks prescribe it because it is the 
cheapest stimulant; routine doctors prescribe it be- 
cause its stimulating effect is more infallible than that 
of other poisons ; empirists prescribe it at the special 
request of their patients, or as a temporary prophy- 
lactic ; others because they find it in the ready-made 
formulas of their dispensatories. There is another 
reason which I might forbear mentioning, but I hold 
that a half-truth is a half -untruth, and I will name 
that other reason : Ignorant patients demand an im- 
mediate effect. They send for a doctor, and are to 
pay his bill ; they expect to get their money's worth 
in the form of a prompt and visible result. Instead 
of telling the ^m-patient that he must commit himself 
into the hands of Nature, that she will cure him in 
her own good time, by a process of her own, and that 
all art can do for him is to give that process the best 
possible chance, and prevent a willful interruption of 



40 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

it — instead of saying anything of the kind, Sangrado 
concludes to humor the popular prejudice and to pro- 
duce the desired prompt and visible effect. For that 
purpose alcohol is, indeed, the most reliable agent. 
It will spur the jaded system into a desperate effort 
to expel the intruder, though the strength expended 
in that effort should be ever so urgently needed for 
better purposes. The dose is administered ; the pa- 
tient can not doubt that a u change" of some kind or 
other has been effected ; the habitual drunkard per- 
haps feels it to be a (momentary) change for the bet- 
ter ; at all events, the doctor has done something, and 
proved that he can " control the disease." In some 
exceptional cases of that sort the influence of imagi- 
nation may help to cure a believing patient, or Nature 
may be strong enough to overcome the disease and 
the stimulant at one effort. And if a doctor can rec- 
oncile it with his conscience to risk such experiments, 
how shall we prevent it ? As a first step in the right 
direction, we can refuse to swallow his prescription. 
Physicians have no right to experiment on the health 
of their patients. They have no right to expect that 
we shall stake our lives on the dogmas of the old 
stimulant theory till they have answered the objec- 
tions of the naturalistic school. 

Drastic drugs are not wholly useless. There are 
two or three forms of disease which have (thus far) 
not proved amenable to any non-medicinal cure, and 
can hardly be trusted to the healing power of Nature 
— the lues venera, scabies, and prurigo — because, as 
a French physiologist suggests, "the cause and the 
symptoms are here, for once, identical, the probable 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 41 

proximate cause being the agency of microscopic 
parasites, which oppose to the action of the vital forces 
a life-energy of their own." Antidotes and certain 
anodynes will perhaps also hold their own till we find 
a way of producing their effects by mechanical means. 

But, with these rare exceptions, it is by far the 
safer as well as shorter way to avoid drugs, reform 
our habits, and not interrupt the course of Nature, for, 
properly speaking, " disease itself is a healing pro- 
cessP "It is not true," says Dr. Jennings, "that the 
human system, when disturbed and deranged in its 
natural operations, becomes suicidal in its action ; . . . 
such a view presents an anomaly in the universe of 
God's physical government. It is not in accordance 
with the known operations and manifestations of other 
natural laws " (" Medical Keform," p. 129). " The 
idea that the symptoms of disease must be sup- 
pressed," says Bichat, " has led to innumerable falla- 
cies and blunders." 

Dr. Benjamin Eush said in a public lecture : " I 
am here incessantly led to make an apology for the 
instability of the theories and practice of physic, and 
those physicians generally become the most eminent 
who have the soonest emancipated themselves from 
the tyranny of the schools of physic. Dissections 
daily convince us of our ignorance of disease, and 
cause us to blush at our prescriptions. "What mischief 
have we done under the belief of false facts and false 
theories ! We have assisted in multiplying diseases ; 
we have done more, we have increased their mor- 
tality. I will not pause to beg pardon of the faculty 
for acknowledging, in this public manner, the weak- 



42 THE POISON PKOBLEM. 

ness of our profession. I am pursuing Truth, and am 
indifferent whither I am led, if she only is my leader." 

" Our system of therapeutics," says Jules Yirey, 
" is so shaky (vacillant) that the soundness of the basis 
itself must be suspected." 

" The success of the homoeopathic practice has as- 
tonished many discerning minds," says Dr. Jennings. 
" It is unnecessary for my present purpose to give a 
particular account of the results of homoeopathy ; . . . 
what I now claim with respect to it is, that a wise 
and beneficent Providence is using it to expose a deep 
delusion. In the result of homoeopathic practice we 
have evidence in amount, and of a character sufficient, 
most incontestably to establish the fact that disease is 
a restorative process, a renovating operation, and that 
medicine has deceived us. The evidence is full and 
complete. It does not consist merely of a few isolated 
cases, whose recovery might be attributed to fortui- 
tous circumstances, but it is a chain of testimony forti- 
fied by every possible circumstance. All kinds and 
grades of disease have passed under the ordeal, and 
all classes and characters of persons have been con- 
cerned in the experiment as patients or witnesses; . . . 
while the process of inftnitesimally attenuating the 
drugs was carried to such a ridiculous extent that no 
one will, on sober reflection, attribute any portion of 
the cure to the medicine. I claim, then, that homoe- 
opathy may be regarded as a providential sealing of 
the fate of old medical views and practices " (" Medi- 
cal Eeform," p. 247). 

Since physiology was first studied methodically, 
an overwhelming array of facts has, indeed, proved 



THE CAUSES OF INTEMPEKANCE. 43 

that the disorders of the human organism can be cured 
more easily without poison-drugs ; more easily in the 
very degree that would suggest the suspicion that our 
entire system of therapeutics is founded upon an er- 
roneous view of disease. The homoeopathists cure 
their patients with milk-sugar, the exponents of the 
movement-cure with gymnastics, the hydropathists 
with cold water, the disciples of Dr. Schrodt with ex- 
ercise and mountain-air, the primitive Christians with 
prayer; JS"ature cures her children with rest and a par- 
tial suspension of the digestive process (the fasting 
cure, indicated instinctively by a loss of appetite). 
But all repudiate alcohol, and all can record swifter, 
more numerous, and more permanent cures than the 
disciples of the nostrum school. 

Considered in connection with the foregoing re- 
marks, these facts admit only of one conclusion, and, 
after giving the above-mentioned exception the bene- 
fit of a (temporary) doubt, we can assert with perfect 
confidence that drastic drugs have no remedial value, 
and that every drop of alcohol administered for me- 
dicinal purposes has not decreased but increased the 
weight of human misery. 

There is no doubt but that these views will awaken 
the anathemas of the poison- worshippers ; but it is 
equally certain that, before the end of this century, 
they will become truisms. We should regard the 
drift of .the main current rather than the incidental 
fluctuations of scientific theories ; and all the ripple of 
conflicting opinions can not conceal the progress of a 
strong tendency toward total abstinence from all viru- 
lent drugs. 



CHAPTEK III. 

PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF THE POISON-HABIT. 

" The stimulant- vice is the principal cause of human degeneration." 

— Roller, 

Science tells us that there is a general progres- 
sive tendency in Nature. According to the opinion of 
some modern biologists, all plants and animals have 
been developed from lower and less perfect organ- 
isms, and still continue their upward progress. We 
may reject that view, or accept it with considerable 
modifications ; but one thing remains certain — Nature 
does not go backward of her own accord. Wherever the 
harmony of creation has not been willfully disturbed, 
the trees are as tall as of yore, the fruits as sweet, and 
the flowers as fragrant. The eagle soars as high as 
ever ; the song-thrush has not forgotten her anthems, 
nor the swallow her swift flight; the ostrich still 
scorneth the horse and his rider; it still requires a 
Samson to rend a young lion. How, then, can it be 
explained that the noblest work of Nature makes a 
sad exception to that rule ? How is it that man alone 
is sinking in misery and disease, growing weaklier 
and sicklier from century to century, from generation 
to generation? War has not dealt us those wounds; 
famine and pestilence can not explain our " ailments 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 45 

and pains, in form, variety, and degree beyond de- 
scription." The influence of all transient causes of 
evil is counteracted by the healing agencies of Na- 
ture. See the children of the wilderness, how soon 
they recover from hurts and wounds, how completely 
from the effects of protracted starvation, their off- 
spring as sound as their ancestors in Eden. No, the 
cause of our degeneracy must be a permanently active 
cause, and, with the assurance of a clear and perfect 
conviction, we can say, That restless enemy of human 
health and happiness is the poison-vice. 

Without the redeeming influence of Nature, the 
balm of sleep and the regenesis of every new birth, 
alcohol alone would have effected the destruction of 
the human race. During the gradual development 
of the vice, the adaptive faculties of the human sys- 
tem have somewhat modified its influence, but its 
real significance reveals itself when its flood-gates are 
opened upon an unprepared race. In Siberia, in 
Polynesia, and among the aborigines of our own con- 
tinent, the alcohol plague has raged with the destruct- 
iveness of the Black Death ; wigwams, villages, nay, 
entire districts, have been depopulated in the course 
of a single generation. Among the Caucasian na- 
tions, where the vice has gradually progressed from 
half-fermented must to brandy, its baneful effects are 
less sudden, but not less certain. From age to age 
the form created in the image of God has decayed, 
has shrunk like a building collapsing under the prog- 
ress of a devouring fire. Wherever intemperance has 
increased, manhood and strength have decreased. 
The Anacreons of antiquity indulged in wine only at 



46 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

occasional festivals. The peasants of the Middle Ages 
were generally too poor to use intoxicating drinks of 
any kind. But by and by wages improved. Strong 
ale and brandy were added to the home-brewed bev- 
erages of the working-classes. Habitual stimulation, 
once the ruin of the idle aristocrat, became the curse 
of the masses. The poison marasmus became a pan- 
demic plague. The yeomen of ancient England 
would not recogonize their gin-drinking descendants ; 
a Norman knight could have crushed a Stockholm 
dandy with a single grip of his fist. Challenge the 
apostles of lager beer ; take them to Nuremberg, to 
the armory of the old City Hall ; let them pick their 
champion from the ranks of the bloated and sickly- 
looking citizens ; defy them to find a single man able 
to wield the weapons that were toys in the hands of 
the old burghers. Or the advocates of " good, cheap, 
country wine " — take them to Spain, and let them see 
what the best wine has done for the manliest race on 
earth. The inhabitants of Castile, of Aragon, Va- 
lencia, Barcelona, and Leon are the descendants of 
the old Yisigoths, a race of rude warriors who over- 
powered the disciplined legions of Borne as easily as 
the Bomans would have quelled a rabble of African 
rebels. Gibbon describes their first encounter with 
the Boman armies ; how the imperial general invited 
the Gothic chieftains to a banquet, where he intended 
to assassinate their guards and attack their camps 
during the confusion, and how the Goths were saved 
by the intrepidity of their leaders : " At these words, 
Fritigern and his companions drew their swords, 
opened their passage through the unresisting crowd, 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 47 

and, mounting their horses, hastily vanished from the 
eyes of the astonished Romans. The generals of the 
Goths were saluted by the fierce and joyful acclama- 
tions of the camp ; war was instantly resolved, the 
banners of the nation were displayed according to the 
custom of their ancestors, and the air resounded with 
the march-signals of the barbarian trumpet." No paint- 
er's magic could more vividly evoke the forms of that 
giant race, their chieftains making their way through 
a crowd of shrinking cowards, the tumult of the 
camp, and the iron-fisted warriors receiving their 
leaders with exultant shouts ! And those men were 
the ancestors of the modern Spaniards — lions shrunk 
into cats, eagles into mousing hawks 1 It is idle soph- 
istry to ascribe that result to climatic influences. In 
a warmer climate than Spain, the abstemious Arabs, 
the Afghans, and the Moors, have preserved the vigor 
of their earliest ancestors. The soil that now pro- 
duces lazzaroni and musici was once trod by the con- 
querors of three continents. In the snow-bound wig- 
wams of the North American Indians a cold climate 
has not prevented the ravages of the alcohol plague. 
Poison has filled more graves than the sword, more 
than famine, and the plague, and all the hostile 
powers of Nature taken together. The poison-vice 
hsa shortened our average longevity by twenty 
years,* has turned athletes into cripples, giants into 
dwarfs. 



* Since the end of the seventeenth century — i. e., since a time when 
medical delusions made every hospital a death-trap — longevity has 
sHghtly increased, but, as compared with the first century of our 
.chronological era, it has enormously decreased. Peasants outlive men 



48 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

Yet that result does not prove the vindictiveness 
of Nature, but her patience, the infinite patience that 
has prevented our utter self-destruction by mitigating 
the consequences of our suicidal follies. At night, 
while the drunkard sleeps his torpor sleep, the hand 
of our All-mother cools his fevered brow, the subtle 
alchemy of the organism allays the effects of the 
poison while the system performs at least a portion 
of its vital functions. In every child the influence of 
ancestral sins is modified by the tendency of redeem- 
ing instincts. If it were not for the restless activity 
of those remedial influences, fire-water alone would 
have caused more havoc than the Deluge. From a 
pessimistic point of view, the study of the physical 
effects of the poison-vice might almost justify the 
conjecture of the biologist Hoffmann. "Nature," 
says he, " has set limits to the over-increase of every 
species of animals. Insects prey upon smaller in- 
sects, minnows upon midges, trouts upon minnows, 
pikes upon trouts, the fish-otter upon pikes, and man 
himself upon the fish-otter. Man himself has no 
earthly rival, but Providence (die Vorsehung) has 
met that difficulty by making him a self -destructive 
animal ! " 

If that shocking idea were not at variance with 

of letters, and yet the records of the ancients show that more than 
two thirds of their poets, statesmen, and philosophers were octogena- 
rians. If the years of the patriarchs were solar years, their average 
longevity was two hundred and eighty years ; if they were seasons (of 
six months), at least one hundred and twenty years. The Bible years 
were certainly not months, for men who " saw their children and chil- 
dren's children " can not have died before their thirtieth year. 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 49 

other facts, one might, indeed, admire the ingenious 
adaptation of means to ends ; for, if it were the in- 
tention of God to limit our prosperity and afflict us 
with every possible evil short of absolute annihila- 
tion, he could certainly not have chosen a more effi- 
cient agent than alcohol. 

Alcohol, the rectified product of the vinous fer- 
mentation (i. e., decomposition) of various saccharine 
fluids, and included by chemists among the narcotic 
poisons, exercises a metamorphosic effect on every 
organ of the human body ; and no fact in physiology 
is more incontestably established than that all its ap- 
preciable effects are deleterious ones. The advocates 
of alcohol base their claims upon vague theories. The 
opponents of alcohol base their claims upon obvious 
facts. It has been asserted that alcohol protects the 
system against cold, but the exponents of that theory 
have failed to show how the constituent elements of 
alcohol can take the place of the natural heat-pro- 
ducers, the non-nitrogenous foods. They have also 
failed to explain a fact established by the unanimous 
testimony of polar travelers, namely, that a low tem- 
perature can be longer and more easily endured by 
total abstainers than by those who indulge in any kind 
of alcoholic drinks. (Appendix III.) 

Alcohol has been called a "negative food,'" be- 
cause it retards the progress of the organic changes ; 
but it has been demonstrated that that retardation 
is in every case an abnormal and morbid process, and 
that its results can not benefit the system in any ap- 
preciable way, while its deleterious effects are seen in 
the fatty degeneration of the tissues, the impoverished 
5 



50 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

condition of the blood, and many other symptoms 
characterizing the influence of insufficient nutrition. 
Alcohol has been called a positive food, because, for- 
sooth, it is derived (by a process of decomposition) 
from grain, fruits, and other nutritive substances. 
We might as well call mildew a nutritive substance, 
because it is formed by the decay of wholesome food. 
" There is no more evidence," says Dr. Parker, " of 
alcohol being in any way utilized in the body, than 
there is in regard to ether or chloroform. If alcohol 
is to be still designated as food, we must extend the 
meaning of that term so as to make it comprehend 
not only chloroform, but all medicines and poisons — 
in fact, everything which can be swallowed and ab- 
sorbed, however foreign it may be to the normal con- 
dition of the body, and however injurious to its func- 
tions. On the other hand, from no definition that 
can be framed of a poison — which should include 
those more powerful anaesthetic agents whose poison- 
ous character has been unfortunately too clearly mani- 
fested in a great number of instances — can alcohol be 
fairly shut out." 

The antiseptic influence of alcohol was long sup- 
posed to constitute a safeguard against malarial dis- 
eases, but it has been found that the prophylactic 
effect of distilled liquors is confined to the period of 
actual stimulation (the alcohol fever), and that in the 
long run abstinence is from eight to ten times more 
prophylactic than dram-drinking. 

Alcohol has been mistaken for an invigorating 
tonic; but we have seen that the supposed process 
of invigoration is a process of stimulation, or rather 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 51 

of irritation, and that we might as well try to " in- 
vigorate" a weary traveler by drenching him with 
aqua fortis. (Appendix IV.) 

On the other hand, it has been proved by ocular 
demonstration that alcoholic liquids, applied to the 
living tissue, induce redness and inflammation, and 
cover the mucous lining of the stomach with ulcer- 
ous patches; that they change the structure of the 
liver, stud it with tubercles, and disqualify it for its 
proper functions, though by obstructing its vascular 
ducts they often swell it to twice, and sometimes to 
five times, its natural size. The weight of a healthy 
liver varies from five to eight pounds; and Dr. Tou- 
mans mentions the post-mortem examination of an 
English drunkard whose liver was found to weigh 
fifty pounds, and adds that, in spite of this enormous 
enlargement of the bile-secreting organ, the man died 
from a deficiency of bile. The records of the Paris- 
ian charity hospitals have established the fact, that 
the moderate use of alcoholic drinks during a period 
of five years is sufficient to permeate the substance 
of the liver with fatty infiltrations, and that the liver 
of old drunkards undergoes changes which make it 
practically a lump of inert matter, a mass of com- 
pacted tubercles and scirrhous ulcers. Even in the 
advanced stages of the disorder, a large dose of con- 
centrated alcohol rouses the diseased organ into 
^ sort of feverish activity, which, however, soon 
subsides into a deeper and more incurable torpor. 
Hence the temporary efficacy and ultimate useless- 
ness (to say the least) of alcoholic "liver regula- 
tors." 



52 THE POISOX PROBLEM. 

It has also been proved that alcohol inflames the 
brain, obstructs the kidneys, impoverishes the blood, 
and impairs the functional vigor of the respiratory 
organs. 

The infallible necessity of all these results can be 
more fully realized by a clear comprehension of the 
proximate causes, which may be summed up in a few 
words : While the organism has to waste its strength 
on the elimination of the poison, it must neglect its 
normal functions, or perform them in a hasty, per- 
functory way. Let me illustrate the matter by an 
apologue. A family of poor tenants occupy a cottage 
at the edge of the woods. They are honest, hard- 
working people, trying their best to live within their 
means, but at a certain hour they are every day at- 
tacked by a bear. Before the good man can mend 
his jacket, before the good wife has cooked her din- 
ner, before the boys have finished their spelling-lesson, 
they have to rally and fight that brute. Sometimes 
the bear comes twice a day. They generally man- 
age to hustle him out of the premises, but when they 
return to their cottage the father's jacket is torn into 
shreds, the dinner is burned, and in the excitement of 
the row the boys have forgotten their lesson. Their 
clothes are torn, their hands and faces bear the marks 
of the scrimmage, the whole household is in a state 
of the wildest disorder. The poor people go to work 
and try to repair the mischief the best way they can, 
but before they have finished the job the bear comes 
back, and another rumpus turns the house upside 
down. No wonder that things go from bad to worse, 
no wonder the tenants can not pay their rent ; but a 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 53 

very considerable wonder that the landlord does not 
relieve them by killing that bear. 

The manliest races of the present world are prob- 
ably the Lesghian and Daghestan mountaineers, who 
inhabit the southern highlands of the Caucasus, and 
who defied the power of the Russian Empire for 
sixty-five years. From 1792 to 1858, army after 
army of schnapps-drinking Muscovites attacked them 
from the north, east, and west, and were hurled back 
like dogs from the lair of a lion, and fifteen hundred 
thousand Russian soldiers perished in the Caucasian 
defiles before the Russian eagles supplanted the cres- 
cent of Daghestan : for the heroic highlanders are 
Mohammedans, and total abstainers from intoxicat- 
ing drinks. The Ossetes, who inhabit the foot-hills 
of the northern range, are addicted to the use of sliho- 
vits (peach brandy) and other stimulants, and their 
bloated faces present a striking contrast to the clean- 
cut features of the tribes who have been chosen as 
the representatives of the white race. They are as 
stubborn as their southern neighbors, but not as enter- 
prising; as self-sacrificing in the defence of their 
country, but not as self-reliant. In spite of their 
healthy climate they are cachectic and rather dull- 
witted ; alcohol has stunted their stamina as well as 
their stature. 

But there are other forms of physical degenera- 
tion which can with certainty be ascribed to the influ- 
ence of the secondary stimulants, tobacco, tea, coffee, 
and pungent spices. Tobacco makes the Turks indo- 
lent, tea and coffee make us nervous and dyspeptic ; 
and the worst is, that those minor vices pave the way 



54 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

to ruin ; a constitution enfeebled by theme poison is 
less able to resist the influence of fusel poison. It is 
a great mistake to suppose that abstinence from con- 
centrated alcoholic liquors could atone for the habit- 
ual use of other stimulants. The vices of our ances- 
tors were gross, but one-sided ; ours are more manifold, 
and in their effects more comprehensive. In France 
many so-called temperate drinkers indulge in light 
wine, absinthe, tea, coffee, and chloral, and are weak- 
lier and sicklier than the Hungarian dram-drinkers 
who confine themselves to plum brandy, for the sys- 
tem of the miscellaneous poison-monger has to defend 
itself against five enemies, and, as it were, sustain the 
wounds of five different weapons. The medieval 
knights and many Grecian and Roman epicureans 
could drink a quantity of wine that would kill a mod- 
ern toper ; but they confined themselves to that one 
stimulant, and showed sense enough to keep it from 
their boys, who had a chance to fortify their consti- 
tutions with gymnastics before they endangered them 
with alcohol, and not rarely thus fortified their men- 
tal constitutions to a degree that made them tempta- 
tion-proof. Pythagoras and Mohammed interdicted 
wine, and that statute did not interfere with the propa- 
gation of their doctrines, for voluntary abstainers were 
by no means rare — before the introduction of second- 
ary stimulants. We fuddle our schoolboys with coffee 
and cider, and it is a curious and very frequent conse- 
quence of that early development of the stimulant- 
habit that its victim forgets the happiness of his child- 
hood, and accepts daily headaches and chronic night- 
mares as some of the "ills that flesh is heir to." 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 55 

Kousseau believed that a man would be safe against 
the poison-vice if he could reach his twentieth year 
without contracting the habit, because in the mean 
time observation would have taught him the effects 
of intemperance. But his safety would be guaran- 
teed by another circumstance. He would know what 
health means, and no deference to established customs 
would tempt him to exchange freedom for chains. 

But a still greater mistake is the idea that drunk- 
enness could be abated by the introduction of milder 
alcoholic drinks. We can not fight rum with lager 
beer. All poison-habits are progressive, and we have 
seen that the beer-vice is always apt to eventuate in a 
brandy-vice, or else to equalize the difference by a 
progressive enlargement of the dose. Common 
brandy contains fifty per cent of alcohol, lager beer 
about ten ; so, if A drinks one glass of brandy and 
B five glasses of beer, they have outraged their sys- 
tems by the same amount of poison, and will incur the 
same penalty. Total abstinence is the safe plan, nay, 
the only safe plan, for poisons can not be reduced to 
a harmless dose. By diminishing the quantities of 
the stimulant we certainly diminish its power for mis- 
chief, but as long as the dose is large enough to pro- 
duce any appreciable effect, that effect is a deleteri- 
ous one. (Appendix V.) 

Various diseases, and that artificial disorder called 
intoxication, react on certain faculties of the mind (by 
affecting their corresponding cerebral organ) as regu- 
larly as on the liver, or any other part of the human 
organism. Consumption stimulates the love of life : 
a self -deluding hope of recovery characterizes the ad- 



56 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

vanced stage of the disease as invariably as the hectic 
flush that simulates the color of health. Hasheesh 
excites combativeness. Alcohol first excites and 
gradually impairs self-reliance, and thus undermines 
the basis of truthfulness, of private and social enter* 
prise, of manly courage and generosity. Moral cow- 
ardice, the chief reproach of our generation, has more 
to do with the tyranny of the poison-vice than with 
the despotism of social prejudices. 

If we should define the chief contrasts in the 
moral characteristics of our latter-day generations 
and that of by-gone ages, we could not help includ- 
ing the deficiency in moral courage, which, like many 
other moral tendencies, has a purely physical basis. 
Consumption can turn a taciturn athlete into a queru- 
lous pedant ; climatic fevers break the steadiest habits 
of industry ; gluttony begets cynicism and mental in- 
dolence ; and just as certainly alcohol has turned mill- 
ions of freemen, descendants of the manliest races of 
antiquity, into flunkeys and prevaricating sneaks. 
Our ancestors were victims of gross superstitions, but 
they shamed their posterity by a loyal devotion to 
their convictions; by a readiness to sacrifice freedom 
and fortune in the service of what truth their means 
of inquiry had enabled them to recognize. Our so- 
called tolerance springs often from indifference. Our 
easy-going, crime-condoning philanthropy is too often 
something worse than indifference; our aversion to 
moral and dogmatic controversies is founded chiefly 
on a preference of non-committal secretiveness or 
sham conformity. Our nervous dread of "originality " 
and " eccentricity " is at bottom a dread of mental 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 57 

athletics, a timid connivance at half-truth, untruth, 
and injustice for the sake of " peace." 

Statistics have proved that the prevalence of 
idiocy is proportioned to the prevalence of intem- 
perance. Before the Parliament Committee on Ha- 
bitual Intemperance, Dr. Charles Anstie testified that 
"the tendency to drink is a disease of the brain 
which is inherited. When drinking has been strong 
in both parents, I think it is a physical certainty that 
it will be traced in the children. I have no doubt 
that many persons who were fond of their bottle — 
though never drunk — in the old port-wine drinking 
period, have transmitted very unstable nervous sys- 
tems to their children." 

Before the same committee, Dr. E. P. Mitchell 
stated that " the children of habitual drunkards are 
in larger proportion idiotic than other children, and 
in larger proportion themselves habitual drunkards ; 
they are also in a great proportion liable to the ordi- 
nary forms of acquired insanity — i. e., the insanity 
coming on in later life." 

Prof. Morel, in his " Degeneration of the Human 
Species" (Des degenerescences de Vesjpece humaine), 
mentions " the abuse of alcoholic stimulants, and of 
certain narcotics, under the influence of which there 
have been produced such disorders in the functions 
of the nervous system that, in the results, as we have 
demonstrated, are seen the true symptoms of degen- 
eration of the present age, whether induced by the 
direct influence of the poisonous agent, or by the 
transmission of hereditary dispositions from parent to 
child." 



58 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

" Another potent agency in vitiating the quality 
of the brain," says Dr. Ray, in his work on " Mental 
Hygiene," a is habitual intemperance, and the effect 
is witnessed far oftener in the offspring than in the 
drunkard himself. His habits may induce an attack 
of insanity where the predisposition exists, but he 
generally escapes with nothing worse than the loss of 
some of his natural vigor and hardihood of mind. In 
the offspring, however, on whom the consequences of 
the parental vice may be visited to the third, if not 
the fourth, generation, the cerebral disorder may take 
the form of intemperance, of idiocy or insanity, of 
vicious habits, of impulse to crime, or some minor 
mental obliquities." 

Dr. S. Q. Howe (" Report on Idiocy," Massachu- 
setts Legislature, Doc. "No. 51) states that "out of three 
hundred and fifty-nine idiots, the condition of whose 
progenitors was ascertained, ninety-nine were the chil- 
dren of drunkards. But this does not tell the whole 
story, by any means. By drunkard is meant a person 
known as a habitual and incurable sot. By pretty 
careful inquiry as to the number of idiots of the lowest 
classes whose parents were known to be temperate 
persons, it is found that not one quarter can be so con- 
sidered. 

Dr. Carpenter, in a contribution to the " Contem- 
porary Review" for January, 1873, says: "We have 
a far larger experience of the results of habitual alco- 
holic excesses than we have in regard to any other 
nervine stimulant ; and all such experience points de- 
cidedly to hereditary transmission of that acquired 
perversion of the normal nutrition of the nervous 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 59 

system which it has induced. That this manifests it- 
self sometimes in a congenital idiocy, sometimes in a 
predisposition to insanity which requires but a very 
slight exciting cause to develop it, and sometimes in 
a strong craving for alcoholic drinks, which the un- 
happy victim strives in vain to resist, is the concur- 
rent testimony of all who have directed their atten- 
tion to the inquiry." 

It is true, though, that the manifestation of that 
morbid instinct always requires an external provoca- 
tive. Naturally, every child, of whatever parentage, 
is endowed with a protective instinct begetting a dis- 
tinct aversion to noxious substances, and protesting 
against the nauseous taste of alcohol as strongly as 
against the bitterness of strychnine or the acridity 
of verdigris. The reformed drunkard can reacquire 
that instinct, and, after ten years of abstinence, may 
come to loathe the smell of the liquor-shop. But the 
taste of that liquor is very apt to rekindle the health- 
destroying fire of his passion ; and, in a similar way, 
a few glasses of rum forced upon the reluctant child 
of an habitual toper may awaken a dormant propen- 
sity of which the victim himself perhaps did not sus- 
pect the existence. The children of drunkards are 
characterized by a sort of chronic despondency, some- 
times taking the form of suicidal reveries ; and that 
despondence — the barrier of instinct once removed — 
is very apt to seek relief in artificial stimulants. Dr. 
Bock's observation that the sons of intemperate par- 
ents are frequently given to sexual excesses, admits, 
perhaps, of the same explanation. 

Dr. Norman Kerr, in an address read before the 



60 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

International Congress at Brussels (August, 1880), 
mentions the case of u a gentleman of position, sixty- 
four years old, who is an habitual drunkard. One 
of his sisters (unmarried) is an imbecile through drink- 
ing, and has often tried to commit suicide when 
drunk, by hanging, by poison, by jumping from a 
window. Her insanity has so suicidal a tendency 
that she can not be left for a moment alone. She 
will do anything for drink ; will beg, borrow, steal, 
pawn everything she can lay her hands on. Another 
sister (married) is also a habitual drunkard, who has 
fits of ungovernable fury when in drink, and, being 
dangerous to herself and others, is under restraint. 
Thus, all the family are dipsomaniacs. The fatal 
legacy in his case was from both parents. The father 
shot himself while laboring under alcoholic mania, 
and the mother was an inveterate drunkard. The 
grandfather was also a confirmed drunkard." 

" There is no single habit in this country," says 
Sir Henry Thompson, " which so much tends to de- 
teriorate the qualities of the race, and so much dis- 
qualifies it for endurance in that competition which, 
in the nature of things, must exist, and in which 
struggle the prize of superiority must fall to the best 
and the strongest." 

Dr. Nathan Allen, in a memorial read before the 
Massachusetts Board of State Charities, calls attention 
to many striking proofs that the most "prolific cause 
of human degeneration is the common habit of taking 
alcohol into the system, usually as the basis of spirits, 
wine, or beer. The effects of alcohol upon the senses, 
and even upon the bodily functions, vary according 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 61 

to the medium in which it is conveyed ; but, the basis 
being the same in all, the constitutional effects are 
about the same. It is well known, however, that al- 
cohol acts unequally upon man's nature ; that it stimu- 
lates the lower propensities and weakens the higher 
faculties." ... "If this process is often repeated, 
the lower propensities are strengthened until, by and 
by, they come to act automatically, while the restrain- 
ing power, or the will, weakened by disuse, are prac- 
tically nullified. The man is no longer under control 
of his voluntary powers, but has come under the do- 
minion of automatic functions which are almost as 
much beyond his control as the beating of his heart. 
And the stimulus of the brain by alcoholized blood, 
in ever so small doses, must produce the same kind 
of results, only in a lesser degree." ..." The facts 
and considerations just named make clear the sad 
truth, that the children of parents whose systems were 
tainted by alcoholic poison do start in life under great 
disadvantages. While they inherit strong animal 
propensities and morbid appetites, constantly craving 
indulgence, they have weak restraining faculties. 
Their temptation is greater and their power of re- 
sistance is less than in children of purer stock. They 
are, therefore, more likely to fall into the pauper or 
criminal class." 

The brain-stimulating effect of alcohol decreases 
with every repetition of the dose, and Dr. Theodore 
Chambers warns us that " however long the evil re- 
sults of such habitual overtasking may be postponed, 
they are sure to manifest themselves at last in that 

general breakdown which is the necessary sequence 
6 



62 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

of a long-continued excess of expenditure over in- 
come." 

Besides, even the temporary results would not jus- 
tify that expenditure. "Brain-workers should con- 
fine themselves to metaphysical tonics" says Dr. Bou- 
chardat. " Alcoholic drinks, at any rate, are unavail- 
able for that purpose. Even after a single glass of 
champagne I have found that the slight mental exalta- 
tion is accompanied by a slight obfuscation. The 
mind soars, but it soars into the clouds." "Wine 
stirs the brain," says the poet Chamisso, "but not 
its higher faculties as much as the sediments that 
muddle it." 

The Arabs have a tradition that soon after the 
flood, when Nunus (the Arabian Noah) had resumed 
his agricultural pursuits, a Ghin, or spirit, appeared 
to him and taught him the art of manufacturing wine 
from grape-juice. " This beverage, O son of an earth- 
ly father," said the Ghin, "is a liquid of peculiar prop- 
erties. The first bumperful will make you as tame as 
a sheep. If you repeat the experiment you will be- 
come as fierce as a rampant lion. After the third dose 
you will roll in the mud like a hog." If the GJiin 
had been a spirit of epigrammatic abilities he might 
have summarized his remarks : " The effects of this 
liquid, O Nunus, vary, of course, with the amount of 
the dose ; but if you drink it, you will infallibly 
make a beast of yourself." 

In the long list of artificial stimulants, with all 
their modifications and compounds, there is no such 
thing as a harmless tonic. Alcohol especially is, in 
all. its disguises, the most implacable enemy of the 



PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 63 

human organism. In large quantities it is a lethal 
poison ; in smaller doses its effects are less deadly, but 
not less certainly injurious, and the advocates of mod- 
erate drinking might as well recommend moderate 
perjury. Our lager-beer enthusiasts might just as 
well advise us to introduce a milder brand of rattle- 
snakes. The alcohol-habit, in all its forms and in 
every stage of its development, is a degrading vice. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 
" Shall we sow tares and pray for bread ? " — Abd el Wahab. 

If we consider the manifold afflictions which in 
the after years of so many millions of our fellow-men 
outweigh the happiness of childhood, we can hardly 
wonder that several great thinkers have expressed a 
serious doubt if earthly existence is on the whole a 
blessing. Yet, for those who hold that the progress 
of science and education will ultimately remove that 
doubt, it is a consoling reflection that the greatest of 
all earthly evils are avoidable ones. The earthquake 
of Lisbon killed sixty thousand persons who could 
not possibly have foreseen their fate. In 1282 an ir- 
ruption of the Zuyder Sea overwhelmed sixty-five 
towns whose inhabitants had not five minutes' time 
to effect their escape. But what are such calamities 
compared with the havoc of wanton wars, or the rav- 
ages of consumption and other diseases that are the 
direct consequences of outrageous sins against the 
physical laws of God ? The cruelty of man to man 
causes more misery than the rage of wild beasts and 
all the hostile elements of Nature ; but the heaviest of 



THE COST OF INTEMPEKANCE. 65 

all evils in our great burden of self-inflicted woe is 
undoubtedly the curse of the poison-vice. The alco- 
hol-habit is a concentration of all scourges. In the 
poor island of Ireland alone one hundred and forty 
million bushels of bread-corn and potatoes are yearly 
sent to the distillery. The shipment of the grain, its 
conversion into a health-destroying drug, the distribu- 
tion and sale of the poison, are carried on under the 
protection of a so-called civilized government. Waste 
is not an adequate word for that monstrous folly. If 
the grain farmers of Laputa should organize an expe- 
dition to the sea-coast, and, under the auspices of the 
legal authorities, equip an apparatus for flinging a 
hundred million sacks of grain into the ocean, the 
contents of those sacks would be lost, and there would 
be an end of it : the sea would swallow the cargo. 
The distillery swallows the grain, but disgorges it in 
the form of a liquid fire, that spreads its flames over 
the land and scorches the bodies and souls of men till 
the smoke of the torment arises from a million home- 
steads. We might marvel at the extravagance of the 
Laputans, but what should we say if the priests of a 
pastoral nation were to slaughter thousands of herds 
on the altar of a national idol, and, in conformity with 
an established custom, let the carcasses rot in the open 
fields till the progress of putrefaction filled the land 
with horror and pestilence ; if, moreover, among the 
crowd of victims we should recognize the milch cows 
of thousands of poor families whose children were 
wan with hunger, and if, furthermore, the intelligent 
rulers of that nation should supervise the ceremonies 
of the sacrifice, distribute the carcasses, and calmly 



66 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

collect statistics to ascertain the percentage of tlie re- 
sultant mortality ? 

The loss of life caused by the ravages of the 
alcohol-plague equals the result of a perennial war. 
The most belligerent nation of modern times, the 
Russians, with the perpetual skirmishes on their east- 
ern frontier, and their periodical campaigns against 
their southern neighbors, lose in battle a yearly aver- 
age of 7,000 men. The average longevity of the 
Caucasian nations is nearly thirty-eight years; of 
their picked men about forty-five years. The average 
age of a soldier is nowadays about twenty-five years. 
The death of 7,000 soldiers represents, therefore, a na- 
tional loss of 7,000 times the difference between 
twenty-five and forty-five years, i. e., a total waste of 
140,000 years. Medical statistics show that in the 
United States alone the direct consequences of in- 
toxication cost every year the lives of 6,000 per- 
sons, most of them reckless young drunkards, who 
thus anticipate the natural term of their lives by about 
twenty years. But at the very least, two per cent of 
our population is addicted to the constant use of some 
form of alcoholic liquors. Prof. Neeson, of the Brit- 
ish General Life Insurance Company, estimates that 
rum-drinkers shorten their lives by seven years, beer- 
drinkers by five and one half, and " mixed drinkers " 
by nine and one half years. For the city of London, 
Sir H. Thompson computes that drinkers of all classes 
shorten their lives by six years. But let us be quite 
sure to keep within the limits of facts applying to all 
conditions of life, and assume a minimum of four 
years. A total of 4,120,000 years for the population 



THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 67 

of the United States is therefore a moderate estimate 
of the annual life-waste by the consequences of the 
poison-vice ! In other words, in a country of by no 
means exceptionally hard drinkers, alcohol destroys 
yearly thirty times as much life as the warfare of the 
most warlike nation on earth. The first year of the 
war for the preservation of the Union and the sup- 
pression of slavery cost us 82,000 lives. When the 
death-list had reached a total of 100,000, the clamors 
for peace became so importunate that the representa- 
tives of our nation were several times on the point of 
abandoning the cause of the most righteous war ever 
waged. Yet the far larger life-waste on the altar of 
the Poison-Moloch continues year after year, and for 
a small bribe not a few of our prominent politicians 
6eem willing to perpetuate that curse to the end of 
time. Among all the nations of the Christian world, 
with the only exception of the Syrian Maronites, the 
poison-vice has shortened the average longevity of 
the working classes by at least five years. Political 
economists have calculated the consequent loss of pro- 
ductive force, but there is another consideration which 
is too often overlooked. The progress of degenera- 
tion has reduced our life-term so far below the nor- 
mal average that the highest purposes of individual 
existence are generally defeated. Our lives are most- 
ly half -told tales. Our season ends before the harvest 
time ; before the laborer's task is half done he is 
overtaken by the night, when no man can work. The 
secret of longevity would, indeed, solve the chief rid- 
dle of existence, for the children of toil could then 
hope to reach the goal of the visible compensation 



68 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

which, on earth at least, is now reserved for the ex- 
ceptional favorites of fortune. That hope is dimin- 
ished by everything that tends still further to reduce 
our shortened span of life, and, besides increasing the 
burdens of existence, the poison-vice therefore di- 
rectly decreases the possibility of its rewards. 

Yet that result is almost insured by the loss of 
health which all experienced physiologists admit to 
be the inevitable consequence of the stimulant-habit. 
Every known disease of the human system is aggra- 
vated by intemperance. The morbid diathesis, as 
physicians call a predisposition to organic disorders, 
finds an ally in alcohol that enables it to defy the ex- 
purgative efforts of Nature. A consumptive toper 
will fail to derive any benefit from a change of cli- 
mate. A dram-drinking dyspeptic can not be cured 
by out-door exercise. The influence of alcoholic 
tonics tends to aggravate nervous disorders into men- 
tal derangements. But even the soundest constitu- 
tion is not proof against the bane of that influence. 
Before the end of the first year habitual drinkers lose 
that spontaneous gayety which constitutes the happi- 
ness of perfect health as well as of childhood. The 
system becomes dependent upon the treacherous aid 
of artificial stimulants, and the lack of vital vigor 
soon begins to tell upon every part of the organism. 
Alcohol counteracts the benefit of all the hygienic ad- 
vantages of climate and habit, and it is doubtful if 
the effect of its continued influence could be equaled 
by the intentional introduction of contagious diseases. 
A medical expert might collect the most incurable 
patients in the leper slums of Shanghai, in the laza- 



THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 69 

rettos of Naples, and the fever hospitals of Yera Cruz, 
and distribute them in the cities of another country ; 
yet, a year after the dissemination of such diseases, the 
hygienic condition of a temperate nation would be 
better than that of a drunkard nation after a year of 
the strictest quarantine protection. In the sanitary 
history of the Caucasian nations alcohol has proved 
a worse plague than the Black Death. 

The waste of land and the waste of labor must 
be considered together, in order to comprehend the 
total amount of the loss which the fourteen most civil- 
ized nations inflict on themselves by the unspeakable 
folly of devoting from twenty to twenty-five per cent 
of their fertile area to the production of stimulating 
poisons. If the land thus abused were simply neg- 
lected, if it were abandoned to the weeds and tares, 
the laborers who now cultivate it in the interest of 
hell might employ their time in assisting their friends, 
and help them to cultivate better or larger crops on 
the soil of the adjoining lands. If they should prefer 
to emigrate, their abandoned fields might be culti- 
vated by their neighbors. Even children in the in- 
tervals of their play might plant cherry-stones, and 
help the soil to contribute to the welfare of the com- 
munity. As it is, it contributes only to the develop- 
ment of diseases, vices, and crimes. The productions 
of the land, the toil of the husbandmen, are not only 
utterly lost, but become a curse to the population of 
the country. Starving Ireland devotes a third of her 
arable lands to the production of distillery crops. 
Spain begs with one hand, and with the other flings 
two fifths of her produce to the poison-vender. The 



70 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

statistics of the last census show that distilleries de- 
vour every year 34,300,000 acres of our total farm pro- 
duce ; breweries, 9,600,000 ; wine-cellars, cider-mills 
(not to mention tobacco factories), about 5,000,000 
more ! 

The old settlers of western Arkansas still remem- 
ber the excitement caused by occasional raids of preda- 
tory Indians, who used to cross the Texas border and 
devastate the farms of the frontiersmen. Near Arka- 
delphia they once burned three hundred acres of ripe 
corn, and half a dozen counties joined in the pursuit 
of the marauders. Imagine the blazing indignation, 
the mass meetings, the general uprising of an out- 
raged people, if the Mormons should take it in their 
heads to burn three million acres of our grain crop. 
Yet the distillers not only burn up more than the ten- 
fold amount, but fan the flames to kindle a soul-and- 
body-consuming conflagration, and shriek about in- 
fringements of their privileges if a bold hand here 
and there succeeds in snatching a brand from the 
burning. 

The waste of remedial expenditure must be con- 
sidered under a separate head, for, besides squander- 
ing their own resources, the votaries of the poison- 
fiend waste those of their neighbors, who have to de- 
vise means for mitigating the resulting mischief. 
The care of drunkards, i. e., of persons picked up in 
the streets in a state of life-endangering intoxication, 
costs our hospitals a yearly sum of $5,000,000. A 
list of the various diseases which can be traced to the 
direct or indirect influence of intemperance would re- 
quire the enumeration of nearly all known disorders 



THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 71 

of the human organism ; but, though drunkards be- 
come a burden to their families oftener than to the 
charitable institutions of the community, it has been 
ascertained that they constitute thirty per cent of the 
inmates of such establishments as county infirmaries, 
charity hospitals, almshouses, poor-houses, and lunatic 
asylums. Prisons proper — that is, institutions for the 
cure of moral disorders — are filled with patients where 
derelictions in forty out of a hundred cases have been 
committed either under the immediate influence of 
intoxicating liquors, or as a consequence of such di- 
rect results of intemperance as loss of property, loss 
of credit, loss of moral or mental integrity. In 1870 
the prisons of the United States cost the nation a 
yearly sum of $87,000,000. By this time their cost 
probably amounts to a full $100,000,000. The mag- 
istrates of our city courts have to waste half their 
time on the trial of drunkards. On the blackboards 
of our metropolitan station-houses, " D. D. C." after 
the name of a prisoner means So-and-So locked up 
for drunkenness and disorderly conduct; they have 
to abbreviate the specification of that offence to save 
a little space for other memoranda. If the indirect 
consequences of the poison - vice could be traced 
through all their ramifications, it would be found that 
the suppression of that vice would relieve our cities 
from a burden equivalent to a full half of all their 
municipal taxes. 

The moral loss is not confined to the direct influ- 
ence of the brutalizing poison. The liquor traffic 
defiles all participants of a transaction which involves 
a sin against Nature, a crime against society and pos- 



72 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

terity, and an outrage against the moral instincts of 
the veriest savage, for more than five thousand years 
ago the lawgivers of the Bactrian nomads recorded 
their protest against the vice of intoxication. A 
drunkard who tlees from the prohibitory laws of his 
native place can not escape the voice of an inner 
monitor. The liquor-dealer wlio points to his license 
is not the less conscious that he is an enemy of man- 
kind, and that his servants eat the wages of a soul- 
and-body-corrupting vice. The lawgiver who can be 
bribed to connive at that vice not only sins against 
the laws of political economy, but against Nature and 
the first principles of natural ethics, and forfeits his 
claim to the respect of the community. Faith in the 
sanctity of the law, in the wisdom and integrity of 
the legislator, is the very corner-stone of public 
morals ; but that faith is incompatible with a system 
of legalized crime, and the lawgiver who consents 
to sanction the outrage of the poison-traffic under- 
mines the basis of his authority, and thereby the 
authority of the law itself. It is wholly certain that 
larceny and perjury combined do not damage the 
State the hundredth part as much as the curse of the 
poison-vice ; yet what should we think of the moral 
status of a legislative assembly devising a plan to in- 
crease the national revenues by granting license to 
pickpockets and professional false witnesses ? Imag- 
ine a Titus Oates offering his services on the public 
streets, and a chief justice compelling the courts to 
recognize the legality of his business, and protect him 
in the enjoyment of its emoluments ! Imagine Jack 
Sheppard filching the weekly wages of a half-witted 



THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 73 

working man, and flaunting a government license if 
the wife of his victim should demand the restitution 
of the plunder ! The absurdity of such an arrange- 
ment might seem too glaring to imagine its possi- 
bility. Yet, for the same reason, posterity may refuse 
to credit the records of our liquor system ; for, trans- 
lated into plain speech, the contract between the State 
and the rum-vender means even this : " On condition 
of receiving a share in the yearly profits of your busi- 
ness, I herewith grant you the right to poison your 
fellow-citizens." 

The loss of wealth, which some of the foregoing 
considerations will enable us to estimate, has increased 
with the progress of our national development in a 
way which in many respects has made that progress a 
curse instead of a blessing. Thirty-five years ago our 
brethren in Maine had a hard fight against the cham- 
pions of the liquor traffic, but they had to deal with 
whisky alone. Since then our foreign immigrants 
have introduced ale, lager beer, and French high 
wines, and threaten to introduce absinthe and opium. 
The poison-vice has assumed the magnitude of a pan- 
demic plague. According to the statistics of the 
Treasury Department, the alcohol drinkers of the 
United States spent during the last ten years a yearly 
average of $370,000,000 for whisky, $58,000,000 for 
other distilled liquors, $56,000,000 for wine, and 
$140,000,000 for ale and beer. Together, $624,000,- 
000 a year. Under the head of liquors evading the 
revenue tax, Prof. W. Hoyle, of Manchester, adds 
twenty per cent for Great Britain, Commissioner 
Halliday fifteen per cent for the United States, and 



74 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

Dr. Bowditch eighteen per cent for the State of Mas- 
sachusetts alone. Let lis assume the minimum of 
fifteen per cent. The total direct cost of the poison- 
vice (without including tobacco and other narcotic 
stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The in- 
direct cost eludes computation, except under the three 
following heads : 1. The loss of productive capacity, 
as revealed in the difference between the yearly earn- 
ings of a manufacturing community under the pro- 
tection of prohibitory laws or under the influence of 
the license system. 2. The inebriate percentage of 
patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in 
our prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers 
of agents, trustees, clerks, etc., addicted to the use of 
intoxicating liquors. The aggregate of these indirect 
losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year, 
though several political economists compute it as equal 
to the direct cost. Our estimate does not include the 
amount of rum-begotten distress relieved by private 
charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime, 
nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefac- 
tions, reforms, and improvements prevented by the use 
of intoxicating liquors among the upper classes. We 
can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth, 
if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison- vice at 
$1,055,000,000 a year — a yearly sum equivalent to the 
cost value of all our public libraries 7 our church prop- 
erty, school property, steamboats, bridges, and tele- 
graphs taken together. (Appendix YI.) 

Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that 
prodigious waste. We will not delude ourselves with 
the hope that the deep-rooted habit of the stimulant- 



THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 75 

vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legis- 
lative measures whatever. For years to come twenty 
per cent of the aggregate would undoubtedly be de- 
voured by liquor-venders finding means to elude the 
vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent would be 
spent on other vices. Fifteen per cent more would 
probably be wasted for frivolous purposes — innocent, 
as compared with the crime of the poison-traffic, but 
still, on the whole, amounting to a loss of national re- 
sources. The waste of the remaining fifty per cent 
could be prevented by prohibition. In ten years 
the saving of that sum and its application to useful 
purposes would transform the moral and physical 
condition of our country. With $5,000,000,000 we 
could construct ten bridges over every one of our 
hundred largest rivers. We could build an interna- 
tional railroad of a gauge that would enable the deni- 
zens of snow-bound New England to reach the tropics 
in twenty -four hours. We could realize Prof. 
Lexow's project of providing every large city with a 
system of free municipal railways connecting the cen- 
ters of commerce with the suburban homes of the 
workingmen. We could make those suburbs attract- 
ive enough to drain the population of the slums. We 
could counteract the temptations of the grop-shops by 
providing the poor with healthier means of recrea- 
tion ; city parks with free baths, competitive gymnas- 
tics and zoological attractions for the summer season, 
and reading-rooms with picture galleries and musical 
entertainments for the long winter evenings. We 
could employ home missionaries enough for a direct 
appeal to every fallen or tempted soul in the country. 



76 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

We could cover our hillsides with orchards and line 
our highways with shade-trees ; we could plant forest- 
trees enough to redeem thousands of square miles in 
the barren uplands of the West. Each township in the 
country could have a free school, each village a free 
public library. We could help the sick by teaching them 
to avoid the causes of disease ; we could prevent 
rather than punish crime ; we could teach our home- 
less vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found 
asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cit- 
ies. And, moreover, we could increase the savings 
of the next decade by the endowment of a National 
Reform College, with a corps of competent sanitarians 
and political economists, for the training of temper- 
ance teachers, with local lecturers, traveling lecturers, 
and free lecture - halls in every large city of the 
country. 

Only thus could prohibition be brought to answer 
its whole purpose, for we should remember that the 
practical efficiency of all government laws depends on 
the consensus of the governed. Without the co-opera- 
tion of the teacher, the mandates of the legislator fall 
short of their aim. But it is equally certain that in 
the field of social ethics the teacher can not dispense 
with the aid of the legislator, and that our lawgivers 
can not much longer afford to ignore that truth, for 
the penalty of the neglect already amounts to the 
equivalent of the average yearly income of seven mill- 
ion working people. In the South a million men, 
women, and children of farm laborers earn less than 
$100,000,000 a year — i. e., $500 for every family 
of five persons. In the manufacturing districts of 



THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 77 

the North they would earn less than $200,000,000. 
We can therefore again be wholly certain of not 
overstating the truth, if we assert that in the United 
States alone the poison-vice devours every year the 
aggregate earnings of more than fourteen hundred 
thousand families. In one-dollar bank-notes of the 
United States Treasury, one billion dollars could be 
pasted together into a paper strip that would reach 
up to the moon. Stacked up in bundles, they would 
form a paper pile a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, 
and fifty feet high. 

If the equivalent of so many creature-comforts 
could be employed for the benefit of the poor, it 
would almost realize the dreams of a Golden Age. 
But even if we could save it from the hands of the 
poison- vender by burning it on the public streets, all 
friends of mankind would hail the conflagration as 
the gladdest bonfire that ever cheered the hearts of 
men. For its flames would save more human lives 
than the perpetual peace of the millennium ; it would 
prevent more crimes than the civilization of all the 
savages that infest the prairies of our border states 
and the slums of our large cities. Nay, it would save 
us from evils for which mankind has thus far discov- 
ered no remedy, for intemperance robs us of bless- 
ings which human skill is unable to restore. 



CHAPTEE V. 

ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 
" Reforms advance with or without such allies." — Kossuth. 

Untenable dogmas are often abandoned in prac- 
tice before they are repealed in theory. The penal 
code of several European nations still contains stat- 
utes on witchcraft. Several States of the American 
Union have failed to abrogate the Blue-Laws of the 
eighteenth century, though no combination of bigots 
and Dogberrys could nowadays persuade an American 
jury to convict a man for doubting the predictions of 
St. Augustine, or keeping his Sabbath on the seventh 
day of the week. Our medical text-books, too, are 
still full of prescriptions which intelligent physicians 
have ceased to prescribe for the last thirty years. 
Drastic drugs of the more virulent kinds have gone 
out of fashion almost as completely as venesection. 
Doctors cease to prescribe them, partly because they 
can not induce their patients to follow or to appreciate 
the prescription, but partly also because they have 
begun to recognize the true significance of toxic 
stimulation. They have recognized the fact that a 
virulent drug can at best only force JSTature to post- 



ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 79 

pone the crisis of a disease, and interrupt the course 
of a process which, after all, might be the safest as 
well as most direct path to the goal of recovery. 
They have learned to mistrust the expediency of a 
plan which so often suppressed the last symptoms of 
vitality in aiming to suppress the symptoms of the 
disease. 

That mistrust has led inquirers to the adoption of 
a new plan, empirics to the adoption of compromise 
methods, especially in the prescription of milder reme- 
dies, holding a sadly subordinate rank in the thera- 
peutics of old-school practitioners, but impeaching 
that classification by a rather suspicious adequacy to 
the main purpose. Drastic stimulants admit of "sub- 
stitutes." Homoeopathy, natural hygiene, and the ex- 
periments of the compromise party, have left no doubt 
that diseases of all sorts can be cured by remedies 
which leave us at liberty to ascribe that result to 
their " milder action," or their neutrality — in plainer 
words, to a non-action, leaving Nature to pursue 
her course unmolested, which may be exactly the 
favor most apt to be appreciated, as Lord Clive 
told his Bengal allies, who threatened to leave him 
alone unless he would adopt their plan of cam- 
paign. 

Even to diminish the risk of the direct result, the 
use of virulent stimulants ought to be abandoned in 
all cases where experience speaks in favor of a harm- 
less substitute ; but in one special case that abolition 
seems to be recommended by an additional considera- 
tion, which alone should turn the scales against all 
the objections ever urged with a shadow of tenable 



80 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

pretexts : An international temperance-league should 
withdraw their patronage from all physicians who 
persist in prescribing alcohol for " medical " purposes. 
For, as we shall presently see, the necessity of such 
prescriptions has been disproved by the strongest 
testimony ever accumulated on any medical question. 
Alcohol as a medicine can be rejected in favor of 
safer as well as more efficacious tonics; and that it 
should be thus rejected admits of no doubt, from a 
moral point of view, considering the facts that : 

1. Fifteen per cent of all confirmed topers owe 
their ruin to the after-effects of a medical prescrip- 
tion. 

2. A single dose of alcoholic drugs is sufficient to 
reawaken the dormant passion of a reclaimed inebriate, 
or to kindle the fuel prepared by the transmission of 
hereditary tendencies. 

" A young gentleman," says Dr. Isaac Jennings, 
" after drinking hard a number of years, abandoned 
the practice, became a Methodist clergyman, and, 
twenty years after he had tasted any "kind of alcoholic 
drinks^ called one evening on a friend in Albany, 
wet, cold, and very much fatigued by a hard day's 
ride in a storm, and was urged by his friend to take 
a little ale, with an importunity that would take no 
denial. At length he consented, and drank part of a 
glass. After sitting a little while he took his hat, left 
the room suddenly, went to a grocery-store in the 
neighborhood, and called for and drank spirits; from 
this store he went to another, and, in the course of 
the evening, called at a number of these thorough- 
fares to death and hell, became noisy and furious, and 



ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 81 

was finally taken to the watch-house. In the morn- 
ing, when the fumes of alcohol w T ere off, or when his 
vital forces had rallied so that he could command his 
mental faculties, all that he could distinctly recollect 
after drinking the ale was that " his head felt terri- 
bly." Dr. Mussey, after stating the case of the young 
man who cut off his hand to get rum, says : " In an- 
other populous town in the same State there lived an 
habitual drinker who, in an interval of reflection, 
made a vow that he would drink no more spirits for 
forty years, never doubting that forty years would 
place him in his grave. He actually kept his vow, 
and, at the expiration of the stipulated period, ven- 
tured to take a little liquor, as it seemed no more 
than a friendly salutation given to an old acquaint- 
ance, and in a short time died a sot." 

Alcohol can in no case be considered an indispen- 
sable means either of maintaining or restoring the 
normal condition of the human organism. Men who 
have mustered the will-force of deciding the question 
by a practical experiment have always found that, 
even after years of indulgence in a variety of seduc- 
tive poisons, total abstinence from all stimulants what- 
ever is sure to reward itself by the blessing of im- 
proved health. 

"Having determined, for myself, to die a sober 
man," says the author of " Medical Reform," " I used 
intoxicating drinks of every kind moderately, as it 
was called ; and, in consequence of it, I probably had 
sickness more moderately than I otherwise should have 
had. Knowing, from long observation, the dreadful 
evils of intemperance, when our temperance reforma- 



82 THE POISON PKOBLEM. 

tion began, I early and joyfully joined the temperance 
society, and abstained entirely from the use of distilled 
spirits. It was not long before I was convinced of 
the propriety of adopting the same course with wine, 
beer, cider, and all fermented drinks. It was pleasing 
to feel how, step by step, I improved in health as I 
made each successive sacrifice. Encouraged by these 
beginnings, and knowing that there were other things 
injurious to health which I was practising, I deter- 
mined to take a new start in the path of reformation, 
and successively gave up the use of strong, high- 
seasoned food of every description, my tobacco — yes, 
my tobacco, the idol of my life, which I had used for 
nearly fifty years, and without which life seemed a 
burden ; yes, that soothing comforter of my life — my 
vile, filthy, health-destroying weed had to go ; and, 
not very long after, my tea, my coffee. I know that 
some will say, ' You poor, deluded fanatic ; you have 
deprived yourself of all the comforts of life, and what 
have you now worth living for?' I have health — 
such health as men never enjoy who do not lead a 
uniformly temperate life. For years I have scarcely 
known what an ache or pain is ; and for years I have 
not had a cold worth calling a cold. My appetite is 
always good. I have a great pleasure in eating what- 
ever is suitable for man to eat, and I have lost all de- 
sire for anything but the plain, nourishing food on 
which I live. I feel as if I had gone back many years 
of my life, and have the ability and disposition to 
perform much more labor than I had seven years ago. 
Here is what I have that is worth living for ; and I 
will ask those inquirers, in turn, what do they enjoy 



ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 83 

that is more worth living for ? Do they eat the luxu- 
ries and fat things of the earth, and drink the fruit of 
the vine in its fermented and joy-inspiring state ? I 
use my plain food and plain water with as much pleas- 
ure and gratification as they, for I have tried both, 
and speak from experience, and know that their grati- 
fications are often followed by a bitter pang, and that 
mine are not. Indeed, so far am I from suffering 
from my mode of living that it has relieved me en- 
tirely from the common sufferings of life, to which 
improper living exposes us. I used to suffer much 
from headache, sick stomach, want of appetite, irregu- 
larity of the bowels, restless nights, and a most dis- 
tressing affection of the heart — a disease which has 
become one of the most malignant and alarming dis- 
orders of our land. Of all these I have got cured by 
relinquishing stimulants and improper food." 

Here is the testimony of a man who at an advanced 
period of life abandoned the use of seven different 
tonics, and found his abstinence a panacea unrivalled 
by all the drugs of the school whose remedies he had 
tested for half a century. Can health not be restored, 
as well as sustained, without the use of alcoholic stimu- 
lants ? Homoeopathy has answered that question by 
test-experiments embracing every stage of every form 
of disease, and with results which admit of but one 
conclusion. Her very opponents, who regard the in- 
finitesimal doses of Dr. Hahnemann as so much harm- 
less but ineffective milk-sugar, hereby admit that the 
numberless disorders which have been successfully 
treated on that plan can be cured with pellets of milk- 
sugar better than with more virulent drugs. 



84 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

" Some of the advocates for the moderate use of 
some kind of internal stimulants," says Dr. Jennings, 
" contend that all the capabilities of man as a physical 
and mental being can not be fully developed without 
such provocatives. This is a very unnatural view of 
the subject, and I am confident that facts do, or will, 
clearly show it to be a false one. Nature no more 
needs goading up to the discharge of her duty to the 
full extent of her ability, ' sick or well,' than an am- 
bitious woman does." 

" Alcohol is neither a food nor a generator of force 
in the human body," says Dr. N. S. Davis, ex-Presi- 
dent of the American Medical Association, " and 1 
have found no case of disease, and no emergency 
arising from accident, that I could not treat more 
successfully without any form of fermented and dis- 
tilled liquors than wiihP " The question recurs," 
says the same writer, " What are the positive effects of 
alcohol when taken in the ordinary manner? Like 
ether and chloroform, its presence diminishes the sen- 
sibility of the nervous system and brain, thereby ren- 
dering the individual less conscious of all outward 
impressions. This diminution of sensibility, or anaes- 
thesia, is developed in direct ratio to the quantity of 
alcohol taken, and may be seen in all stages, from 
simple weight, exhibited by ease, buoyancy, hilarity, 
etc., to that of complete unconsciousness, and loss of 
muscular power. It is this anaesthetic effect of alco- 
hol that has led to all the popular errors and contra- 
dictory uses which have proved so destructive to hu- 
man health and happiness. It has long been one of 
the noted paradoxes of human action that the same 



ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 85 

individual would resort to the same alcoholic drink to 
warm him in winter and protect him from the heat 
in summer, to strengthen when weak and weary, and 
to soothe and cheer when afflicted in body or mind. 
With the facts now before us, the explanation of all 
this is apparent. Alcohol does not relieve the indi- 
vidual from cold by increasing his temperature, nor 
from heat by cooling him, nor from weakness and 
exhaustion by nourishing his tissues, nor yet from 
affliction by increasing nerve-power, but simply by 
diminishing the sensibility of his nerve structures and 
thereby lessening his consciousness of impressions^ 
whether from cold or heat or weariness or pain. In 
other words, the presence of alcohol has not in any 
degree lessened the effects of the evils to which he is 
exposed, but has diminished his consciousness of their 
existence, and thereby impaired his judgment con- 
cerning the degree of their action upon him. It is 
this property of alcohol to produce that sense of ease, 
buoyancy, and exhilaration, arising from a moderate 
diminution of nerve sensibility, that gives it the fascia 
nating and delusive power over the human race which 
it has wielded so ruinously for centuries gone by. 
But, while the presence of alcohol diminishes the sen- 
sibility of the nervous structure, it also retards all the 
molecular changes, thereby diminishing the activity 
of nutrition, secretion, elimination and the evolution 
of heat, constituting a true organic sedative." 

It might be added that even that limited effect 

decreases with each repetition of the dose ; while in 

the same proportion the morbid hankering after the 

operation of the toxic stimulant continues to increase, 

8 



i ? l 



86 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

After taking a dram of " medicated bitters " once a 
day for three or four weeks, a pint of the same liquor 
hardly insures the effect which at first could be pro- 
duced by half a gill, and, moreover, the slight craving 
has in the meantime become a raging thirst, a poison- 
prurience curable only by total abstinence through 
months of desperate struggles with the demon of 
temptation. A temporary, and, after all, very delu- 
sive, relief, is bought at the price of years of coming 
misery and bondage to a tyrannous habit. 

"One stormy afternoon in 1882," says Mrs. Fran- 
cis Willard, " I accompanied a friend to the Harrison 
Street Police Station. As is generally known, our 
society has now a matron at every station in the city. 
We found that many had been imprisoned that day, 
but the matron directed our attention especially to the 
most distant cell, where a woman lay curled up on a 
bench, with an old shawl over her head. She had 
been brought in drunk some hours before. As we 
stood there, thinking her to be asleep, and lamenting, 
in whispered tones, her sad condition, the woman 
arose, came toward us, grasping with a small, white 
hand the bars of the cell, and spoke to us in a sweet 
voice, saying : ' Do you ladies really care for one so 
hopeless ? ' We assured her of our sympathy, and in 
a talk that followed learned that she was born in a 
leading Southern city, had graduated from a first-class 
normal college, and had been for years a teacher. One 
spring, about four years previous to our meeting, worn 
out with her duties, she went to the family physician, 
who prescribed an alcoholic beverage as a ' tonic' 
From that day she had gone down, little by little, un- 



ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 87 

til now she was a confirmed inebriate, often reform- 
ing, but as often relapsing. Subsequent investigation 
proved that she was related to a refined and wealthy 
family in Chicago. They and we have done all in 
our power for her. She has been kept at the 'Mar- 
tha Washington Home,' and for months has kept her 
pledge, only to fall away from it at last." 

Was the prescription that wrought that woman's 
ruin a " medical necessity " ? Could the after-effects 
of mental overwork not be relieved without the aid 
of a poison tending to induce a life-destroying pas- 
sion ? 

Dr. Andrew Clark, of London, court-physician of 
the royal family, confesses that " Alcohol is not only 
not a helper of work, but a certain hinderer, and 
every man who comes to the front of a profession in 
London is marked by this one characteristic, that the 
more busy he gets the less in the shape of alcohol he 
takes, and his excuse is : ' I am sorry, but I can not 
take it and do my work.' " 

Goethe, who was a moderate wine-drinker for sixty 
years, became an almost total abstainer toward the 
end of his life, having found by experience that the 
habit, even under the control of a strong will-power, 
was too apt to encroach upon his time, and afforded 
no real relief from care or fatigue. Dr. W. B. Car- 
penter, the foremost physiologist of the medical pro- 
fession, records his conviction that " it is the duty of 
the medical practitioner to discourage as much as 
possible the habitual use of alcoholic liquors, in how- 
ever c moderate ' a quantity, by all persons in ordinary 
health, and to seek to remedy those slight departures 



88 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

from health which result from the wear and tear of 
active life by the means which shall most directly re- 
move or antagonize their causes, instead of by such as 
simply palliate their effects. 

" The banishment of alcohol, 9 ' says the editor of 
the Boston " Journal of Chemistry," " would not de- 
prive us of a single one of the indispensable agents 
which modern civilization demands. Neither would 
chemical science be retarded by its loss. In no in- 
stances of disease in any form is it a medicine which 
might not be dispensed with and other agents substi- 
tuted." 

From this rule, so-called climatic diseases were 
long supposed to constitute an exception. But the 
prophylactic value of an alcoholic febrifuge is founded 
merely on the fact that Nature can not fight two 
simultaneous battles against the enemies of the hu- 
man organism, and that her struggle against the influ- 
ence of a life-endangering drug require the temporary 
suspension of hostilities against the virus of malaria. 
In other words, the visible symptoms of that virus 
are temporarily suppressed while the system is con- 
vulsed by the paroxysm of the alcohol fever. But 
the patient can not be kept under the constant influ- 
ence of such antidotes, and in the intervals of the 
stimulant-convulsion the other enemy gets his chance 
and rarely misses it. " Of two hundred and four cases 
of cholera in Park Hospital, New York," says Dr. 
Sewell, " only six recovered, and they were temperate 
persons." The founder of the London Temperance 
Hospital proves that the mortality of his institution is 
four and a half per cent lower than in any other hos- 



ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 89 

pital treating the same variety of cases. Professor 
Bronson, of Montreal, states that, according to his ex- 
perience, " the habitual use of ardent spirits, in the 
smallest quantity, seldom fails to invite cholera and 
render it incurable." 

" The use of alcoholic drinks," says Dr. K. E. Ad- 
ams, " 1 have found to be a great disposing cause of 
malignant disorders. So strong is my opinion on this 
point that, were I one of the authorities and had the 
power, I would placard every spirit-shop in town with 
these words : c Cholera sold here ! ■ " 

In the yellow-fever hospitals of our Gulf-States an 
enormous plurality of rum-drinkers pay the penalty 
of their habit by a disposition to the more malignant 
forms of every epidemic. That climatic diseases are 
amenable to other than distilled drugs, has been known 
ever since the Spanish missionaries of the sixteenth 
century became acquainted with the antiseptic prop- 
erties of the Peruvian cinchona ; not to mention the 
undoubted fact that refrigeration alone is sufficient 
to counteract the blood changes characterizing the 
symptoms of febrile disorders. The use of alcohol 
can be safely dispensed with in all diseases thus far 
brought to the knowledge of medical scientists ; and 
Dr. Greene, of Boston, reminds us of an additional 
reason for renouncing its treacherous aid : " It needs 
no argument to convince us that it is upon the medi- 
cal profession to a very great extent that the rum- 
seller depends to maintain the respectability of the 
traffic. It requires only your own experience and 
observation to convince you that it is upon the medi- 
cal profession, upon their prescriptions and recom- 



90 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

mendations for its use upon so many occasions, that 
the habitual dram-drinker depends for the seeming 
respectability of his drinking habits. It is upon the 
members of the medical profession, and the excep- 
tional laws which it has always demanded, that the 
whole liquor fraternity depends, more than upon any- 
thing else, to screen it from the opprobrium and just 
punishment for the evils which the traffic entails upon 
society, and it is because the rum-seller and the rum- 
drinker hide under this cloak of seeming respecta- 
bility that they are so difficult to reach, either by 
moral suasion or by law. As a result of thirty years 
of professional experience and practical observation, I 
feel assured that alcoholic stimulants are not required as 
medicines, and believe that many, if not a majority of 
physicians to-day, of education and experience, are sat- 
isfied that alcoholic stimulants, as medicines, are worse 
than useless ; and physicians generally have only to 
overcome the force of habit and of prevailing fashions, 
to find a more excellent way, when they will all look 
back with wonder and surprise to find that they, as 
individuals and as members of an honored profession, 
should have been so far compromised." 



CHAPTER VL 

PROHIBITION. 
" Rugged or not, there is no other way." — Luther. 

The champions of temperance have to contend 
with two chief adversaries — ignorance and organized 
crime. The well-organized liquor league can boast of 
leaders whose want of principles is not extenuated by 
want of information, and who deliberately scheme to 
coin the misery of their fellow-men into dollars and 
cents. But the machinations of such enemies of man- 
kind would not have availed them against the power 
of public opinion, if their cunning had not found a 
potent ally in the ignorance, not of their victims only, 
but of their passive opponents. "We need the moral 
and intellectual support of a larger class of our fellow- 
citizens before we can hope to secure the effectual aid 
of legal remedies, and in that direction the chief ob- 
stacles to the progress of our cause have been the 
prevailing misconceptions on the following points : 

1. Competence or Legislative Power. — There 
can be no doubt that the legislative authority even of 
civilized governments has been frequently misapplied. 
The most competent exponents of political economy 



92 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

agree that the state has no business to meddle in such 
affairs as the fluctuation of market prices, the rate of 
interest, the freedom of international traffic. On more 
than one occasion European governments, having at- 
tempted to regulate the price of bread-stuffs, etc., 
were taught the folly of such interference by com- 
mercial dead-locks and the impossibility of procuring 
the necessaries of life at the prescribed price, and 
were thus compelled to remedy the mischief by re- 
pealing their enactments. Usury laws tend to in- 
crease, instead of decreasing, the rate of interest, by 
obliging the usurer to indemnify himself for the dis- 
advantage of the additional risk. The attempt to in- 
crease national revenues by enforcing an artificial 
balance of trade has ever defeated its own object. It 
is almost equally certain that compulsory charities do 
on the whole more harm than good. On the other 
hand, there are no more undoubtedly legitimate func- 
tions of government than the suppression, and the, if 
possible, prevention, of crime, and the enforcement of 
health laws; and it can be demonstrated by every 
rule of logic and equity that the liquor traffic can be 
held amenable in both respects. The favorite argu- 
ment of our opponents is the distinction of crime and 
vice. For the latter, they tell us, society has no 
remedy, except in as much as the natural conse- 
quences (disease, destitution, etc.) are apt to recoil on 
the person of the perpetrator ; the evil of intemper- 
ance therefore is beyond the reach of the law. We 
may fully concede the premises without admitting the 
cogency of the conclusion. The suspected possession 
or private use of intoxicating liquors would hardly 



PROHIBITION. 93 

justify the issue of a search warrant, but the penalties 
of the law can with full justice be directed against 
the manufacturer or vender who seeks gain by tempt- 
ing his fellow-men to indulge in a poison infallibly in- 
jurious in any quantity, and infallibly tending to the 
development of a body- and soul-corrupting habit ; 
they may with equal justice be directed against the 
consumer, stupefied or brutalized by the effects of that 
poison. The rumseller has no right to plead the con- 
sent of his victim. The absence of violence or 
malice prepense is a plea that would legalize some 
of the worst offenses against society. The peddler of 
obscene literature poisons the souls of our children 
without a shadow of ill-will against his individual cus- 
tomer. The gambler, the lottery-shark, use no man- 
ner of force in the pursuit of their prey. By what 
logic can we justify the interdiction of their industry 
and condemn that of the liquor traffic ? By the cri- 
terion of comparative harmlessness ? Have all the 
indecencies published since the invention of print- 
ing occasioned the thousandth part of the misery 
caused by the yearly and inevitable consequences of 
the poison-vice ? The lottery player may lose or win, 
but the customer of the liquor vender is doomed to 
loss as soon as he approaches the dram-shop. The 
damage sustained by the habitual player may be con- 
fined to a loss of money, while the habitual drunkard 
is sure to suffer in health, character, and reputation, 
as well as in purse. And shall we condone the con- 
duct of the befuddled drunkard on account of a tem- 
porary suspense of conscious reason? That very 
(fomentation constitutes his offense. 



94 THE POISON PKOBLEM. 

His actions may or may not result in actual mis- 
chief, but he has put the decision of that event be- 
yond his control. The man who gallops headlong 
through crowded streets is punished for his reckless 
disregard of other men's safety, though the hoofs of 
his horse may have failed to inflict any actual injury. 
A menagerie keeper would be arrested, if not lynched, 
for turning a city into a pandemonium by letting 
loose his bears and hyenas, and for the same reason no 
man should be permitted to turn himself into a wild 
beast. 

"Virtue must come from within," says Professor 
Newman ; " to this problem religion and morality 
must direct themselves. But vice may come from 
without ; to hinder this is the care of the statesman." 
And here, as elsewhere, prevention is better than 
cure. By obviating the temptations of the dram- 
shop, a progressive vice with an incalculable train of 
mischievous consequences may be nipped in the bud. 
Penal legislation is a sham if it takes cognizance of 
moral evils only after they have passed the curable 
stage. "It is mere mockery," says Cardinal Man- 
ning, " to ask us to put down drunkenness by moral 
and religious means, when the legislature facilitates the 
multiplication of the incitements to intemperance on 
every side. You might as well call upon me as a 
captain of a ship and say : i Why don't you pump 
the w T ater out when it is sinking,' when you are scut- 
tling the ship in every direction. If you will cut off 
the supply of temptation, I will be bound by the help 
of God to convert drunkards, but until you have 
taken off this perpetual supply of intoxicating drink 



PROHIBITION. 95 

we never can cultivate the fields. Let the legislature 
do its part and we will answer for the rest." (Ap- 
pendix, VII.) 

All civilized nations have recognized not only the 
ri«*ht but the duty of legislative authorities to adopt 
the most stringent measures for the prevention of 
contagious disease ; yet all epidemics taken together 
have not caused half as much loss of life and health 
as the plague of the poison-vice. 

2. Magnitude of the Evil. — Since health and 
freedom began to be recognized as the primary con- 
ditions of human welfare, the conviction is gaining 
ground that the principles of our legislative system 
need a general revision. It was a step in the right 
direction when the lawgivers of the Middle Ages be- 
gan to realize the truth that the liberty of individual 
action should be sacrificed only to urgent considera- 
tion of public welfare, but the modified theories on 
the comparative importance of these considerations 
have inaugurated a still more important reform. 
Penal codes gradually ceased to enforce ceremonies 
and abstruse dogmas, and to ignore monstrous mu- 
nicipal and sanitary abuses. The time has passed 
when legislators raged with extreme penalties against 
the propagandists of speculative theories and ig- 
nored the propagation of slum diseases, yet, after 
all, there is still a lingering belief in the minds of 
many contemporaries that intemperance, as a physical 
evil, a " mere dietetic excess," does not justify the in- 
vasion of personal liberty. They would consent to 
restrict the freedom of thought and speech rather than 
the license of the rum-dealer, yet the tendency of a 



96 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

progressive advance in public opinion promises the 
advent of a time when that license will appear the 
chief anomaly of the present age. The numberless 
minute prescriptions and interdicts of our law-books, 
and their silence on the crime of the liquor traffic, will 
make it difficult for coming ages to comprehend the 
intellectual status of a generation that could wage 
such uncompromising war against microscopic gnats, 
and consent to gratify the greed of a monstrous vam- 
pire. 

3. Self-correcting Abuses. — Modern physicians 
admit that various forms of disease which were for- 
merly treated with drastic drugs can be safely trusted 
to the healing agencies of Nature. Many social evils, 
too, tend to work out their own cure. High markets 
encourage competition, and have led to a reduction of 
prices. Luxury leads to enforced economy by reduc- 
ing the resources of the spendthrift. Dishonest 
tradesmen lose custom, and a German government 
that used to fine editors for publishing unverified 
rumors might have left it to the subscribers to with- 
draw their patronage from a purveyor of unreliable 
news. But there are certain causes of disease that 
demand the interference of art. Poisons, especially, 
require artificial antidotes. If a child has mistaken 
arsenic for sugar, its life commonly depends on the 
timely arrival of a physician. The organism may rid 
itself of a surfeit, but is unable to eliminate the virus 
of a skin disease. Alcoholism belongs to the same 
class of disorders. We need not legislate against cor- 
sets ; the absurdities of fashion change and vanish 
like fleeting clouds, and their votaries may welcome 



PROHIBITION. 97 

the change; but drunkards would remain slaves of 
their vice though the verdict of public opinion should 
have made dram-drinking extremely unfashionable. 
The morbid passion transmitted from sire to son, and 
strengthened by years of indulgence, would defy all 
moral restraints, and yield only to the practical impos- 
sibility to obtain the object of its desire. 

" A number of years ago," says Dr. Isaac Jennings, 
" I was called to the ship-yard in Derby to see John 
B.. a man about thirty years of age, of naturally stout, 
robust constitution, who had fallen from a scaffold in 
a fit, head first upon a spike below. In my visit to 
dress the wounded head, I spoke to him of the folly 
and danger of continuing to indulge his habit of 
drinking, and obtained from him a promise that he 
would abandon it. Not long after I learned that he 
was drinking again, and reminded him of his promise. 
His excuse was, that it would not do for him to aban- 
don the practice of drinking suddenly. A few weeks 
after this he called at my office and requested me to 
bleed him, or do something to prevent a fit, for he 
felt much as he did a short time before having the 
last fit. I said to him, c John, sit down here with me 
and let us consider your case a little.' I drew two pict- 
ures and held before him — one presented a wife and 
three little children with a circle of friends made 
happy, and himself respectable and useful in society ; 
the other, a wretched family, and himself moldering 
in a drunkard's grave— and appealed to him to decide 
which should prove to be the true picture. The poor 
fellow burst into tears and wept like a child. When 
he had recovered himself from sobbing, so that he 

9 



98 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

could speak, he said : i Doctor, to tell you the truth, 
it is not that I am afraid of the consequences of stop- 
ping suddenly that I do not give up drinking. lean 
not do it. I have tried and tried again, but it is all 
in vain. Sometimes I have gone a number of weeks 
without drinking, and I flattered myself that the 
temptation was gone, but it returned, and now, if there 
was a spot on earth where men lived and could not 
get spirits, and I could get there, I would start in a 
minute.' I thought I had understood something of 
the difficulties of hard drinkers before, but this gave 
me a new impression of the matter, and most solemnly 
did I charge myself to do what I could to make a spot 
on earth where men could live and couldnH get 
spirits." 

4. Lesser Evils. — Even in a stricter form than 
any rational friend of temperance would desire its en- 
forcement, prohibition would not involve any conse- 
quences that could possibly make the cure a greater 
evil than the disease. The predicted aching void re- 
sulting from the expurgation of beer-tunnels could be 
filled by healthier means of recreation. The grief of 
the superseded poison-mongers would not outweigh 
the mountain-load of misery and woe which the abol- 
ishment of their cursed trade would lift from the 
shoulders of the nation. When the State of Iowa de- 
clared for prohibition, the opponents of that amend- 
ment bemoaned the loss entailed by the departure of 
" so many industrious and respectable citizens " — i. e., 
from the exodus of the ramsellers ! We might just 
as well be asked to bewail the doom of the Thugs as 
the subversion of a prosperous industry. We might 



PROHIBITION. 99 

as well be requested to sympathize with the respect- 
able bloodhound-trainers and knout-manufacturers 
whom the abolition of slavery threw out of employ- 
ment. The liquor dealer has no right to complain 
about the rigor of a law that permits him to depart 
with the spoils of such a trade. We are told that the 
mere rumor of Maine laws has deterred many for- 
eigners from making their homes with us ; that the 
Russian peasants decline to come without their brew- 
ers and distillers, and that by general prohibition we 
would risk to reduce our immigration from every 
country of Northern Europe. We must take that risk, 
and let Muscovites rot in the bogs of the Volga if 
they can not accept our hospitality without turning 
our bread-corn into poison. Our utilitarian friends 
would hardly persuade us to legalize cannibalism in 
order to encourage a larger immigration of Feejee isl- 
anders. The absence of such guests might not prove 
an unqualified evil. I shall not insult the intelligence 
of my readers by repeating the drivel of the wretches 
who would weigh the reduction of revenues against 
the happiness of a hell-delivered nation, and I will 
only mention the reply of a British financier, 
who estimates that the increase of national pros- 
perity would offset that reduction in less than five 
years. 

5. Efficacy of Prohibition. — Will prohibition 
prevent the use of intoxicating liquor ? Not wholly, 
but it will answer its purpose. It will banish dis- 
tillers to secret mountain glens and hidden cellars. It 
will drive the man-traps of the poison-monger from 
the public streets. It will save our boys from a hun- 



100 THE POISOX PROBLEM. 

dred temptations ; it will help thousands of reformed 
drunkards to keep their pledge ; it will restore peace 
and plenty to many hundred thousand homes. More 
than a century ago the philosopher Leibnitz main- 
tained that the plenary suppression of the liquor 
traffic would be the most effectual means for reform- 
ing the moral status of civilized nations, and experi- 
ence has since fully demonstrated the correctness of 
that opinion. A memorandum endorsed by a large 
number of statistical vouchers describes the effect of 
prohibition in Sweden : " The nation rose and fell, 
grew prosperous and happy, or miserable and de- 
graded, as its rulers and law-makers restrained or per- 
mitted the manufacture and sale of that which all 
along the track of its history has seemed to be the 
nation's greatest curse." ..." The vigorously main- 
tained prohibition against spirits in 1753-56, and 
again in 1772-75, proved the enormous benefits ef- 
fected in moral, economical, and other respects, by 
abstinence from intoxicating spirits." . . . " This it 
is which has so helped Sweden to emerge from moral 
and material prostration, and explains the existence of 
such general indications in that country of comfort 
and independence among all classes." 

From the "Edinburgh Review" for January, 1873, 
we learn that, in eighty-nine private estates in Eng- 
land and Scotland, " the drink traffic has been alto- 
gether suppressed, with the happiest social results. 
The late Lord Palmerston suppressed the beer-shops 
in Romsey as the leases fell in. We know an estate 
which stretches for miles along the romantic shore of 
Loch Fyne where no whisky is allowed to be sold. 



PROHIBITION. 101 

The peasants and fishermen are flourishing. They 
have all their money in the bank, and they obtain 
higher wages than their neighbors when they go to 
sea » — a proof that a small oasis of temperance can 
maintain its prosperity in the midst of poison-blighted 
communities. 

Here and there the wiles of the poison-mongers 
will undoubtedly succeed in evading the law, but their 
power for mischief will be diminished as that of the 
gambling-hell was diminished in Homburg and Baden, 
where temptation was removed out of the track of the 
uninitiated till the host of victims dwindled away for 
want of recruits. Not the promptings of an innate 
passion, but the charm of artificial allurements, is the 
gate by which ninety-nine out of a hundred drunk- 
ards have entered the road to ruin. It would be an 
understatement to say that the temptation of minors 
will be reduced a hundred-fold wherever the total 
amount of sales has been reduced as much as five-fold 
— a result which has been far exceeded, even under 
the present imperfect system of legal control. " In 
the course of my duty as an internal revenue officer," 
says Superintendent Hamlin, of Bangor, " I have be- 
come thoroughly acquainted with the state and extent 
of the liquor traffic in Maine, and I have no hesitation 
in saying that the beer trade is not more than one per 
cent of what I remember it to have been, and the 
trade in distilled liquors is not more than ten per cent 
of what it was formerly." " I think I am justified in 
saying," reports the attorney-general, "that there is 
not an open bar for the sale of intoxicating liquor in 
this county " (Androscoggin, including the manufact- 



102 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

uring district of Lewiston — once a very hot-bed of the 
rum traffic). "In the city of Biddeford, a manufact- 
uring place of eleven thousand inhabitants, for a 
month at a time not a single arrest for drunkenness 
has been made or become necessary." And from Au- 
gusta (the capital of the State) : " If we were to say 
that the quantity of liquor sold here is not one tenth 
as large as formerly, we think it would be within the 
truth ; and the favorable effects of the change upon 
all the interests of the State are plainly seen every- 
where." 

"It is perhaps not necessary," says the Boston 
"Globe," of July 29, 1875, "to dwell on the evils of 
intemperance, and yet people seldom think how great 
a proportion of these might be prevented by driving 
the iniquity into its hiding-places, and preventing it 
from coming forth to lure its victims from among 
the unwary and comparatively guileless. Few young 
men who are worth saving, or are likely to be saved, 
to decency and virtue, would seek it out if it were 
kept from sight. But, when it comes forth in gay 
and alluring colors, it draws a procession of our youth 
into a path that has an awful termination. 'Nor does 
the evil which springs from an open toleration of the 
way in which this vice carries on its traffic of destruc- 
tion fall only on men. A sad proportion of its vic- 
tims is made up from shop-girls and abandoned women, 
who are not so infatuated at the start that they would 
plunge into a life of infamy if its temptations were 
strictly under the ban, and kept widely separated 
from the world of decency. But it intruded itself 
upon them. Its temptations and opportunities are 



PROHIBITION. 103 

before their eyes, and the way is made easy for their 
feet to go down to death." 

" To what good is it," says Lord Brougham, " that 
the legislature should pass laws to punish crime, or 
that their lordships should occupy themselves in try- 
ing to improve the morals of the people by giving 
them education ? What could be the use of sowing 
a little seed here and plucking up a weed there, if 
these beer-shops are to be continued to sow the seeds 
of immorality broadcast over the land, germinating 
the most frightful produce that ever has been al- 
lowed to grow up in a civilized country, and, I 
am ashamed to add, under the fostering care of Par- 
liament." 

The prohibition of the poison-traffic has become 
the urgent duty of every legislator, the foremost aim 
of every moral reformer. The verdict of the most 
eminent statesmen, physicians, clergymen, patriots, 
and philanthropists, is unanimous on that point. We 
lack energy, not competence, nor the sanction of a 
higher authority, to gain the votes of the masses. 

" We can prove the success of prohibition by the 
experience of our neighboring state," writes Dr. Her- 
bert Buchanan, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; 
"all the vicious elements of society are arranged 
against us, but I have no fear of the event if we do 
not cease to agitate the subject" 

Agitation, a ceaseless appeal to the common sense 
and conscience of our fellow-men, can, indeed, not fail 
to be crowned with ultimate success. The struggle 
with vice, with ignorance and mean selfishness, may 
continue, but it will be our own fault if our adver- 



104 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

saries can support their opposition by a single valid 
argument, and the battle will be more than half won 
if a majority of our fellow-citizens have to admit that 
we contend no longer for a favor, but for an evident 
right. 



CHAPTER VII. 

SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. 

"Deep-rooted evils can not be abolished by striking at the branches." 

— Boerhaave. 

The history of the temperance movement has 
demonstrated the sad futility of palliative remedies. 
We have seen that the malady of the poison-vice is 
not a self-limited, but a necessarily progressive evil. 
The half-way measures of "restrictive" legislation 
have resulted only in furnishing additional proof that 
prevention is better, because less impossible, than con- 
trol.* The regulation of the poison-traffic, the re- 

* " All past legislation has proved ineffectual to restrain the habit 
of excess. Acts of Parliament, intended to lessen, have notoriously 
augmented the evil, and we must seek a remedy in some new direction, 
if we are not prepared to abandon the contest or contentedly to watch 
with folded arms the gradual deterioration of the people. Eestriction, 
in the forms which it has hitherto assumed, of shorter hours, more 
stringent regulation of licensed houses, and magisterial control of 
licenses, has been a conspicuous failure. For a short time after the 
passing of Lord Aberdare's act, hopes were entertained of great results 
from the provisions for early closing, and many chief constables testi- 
fied to the improved order of the streets under their charge ; but it 
soon appeared that the limitation, while it lessened the labor of the 
police, and advanced their duties an hour or so in the night, was not 
sufficient to reduce materially the quantity of liquor consumed, or the 
consequent amount of drunkenness." — "Fortnightly Review. " 



106 THE POISON PEOBLEM. 

dress of the unavoidably resulting mischief, the cure 
and conversion of drunkards, in order to be effectual, 
would impose intolerable and never-ending burdens 
on the resources even of the wealthiest communities, 
while the advocates of prohibition would forestall the 
evils both of the remedy and the disease. 

But we should not overlook the truth that, in our 
own country at least, the poison-plant of intemperance 
springs from a composite root. In southern Spain, 
under the dominion of the Saracens, the poison-vice 
was almost unknown during a series of centuries.* 
The moral code and the religion of the inhabitants 
discountenanced intemperance. The virtue of die- 
tetic purity ranked with chastity and cleanliness. An 
abundance of harmless amusements diverted from 
vicious pastimes. Under such circumstances the ab- 
sence of direct temptations constituted a sufficient 
safeguard against the vice of the poison-habit; 
but, in a country like ours, the efficacy of prohibi- 
tion depends on the following supplementary reme- 
dies: 

1. Instruction. — In the struggle against the pow- 
ers of darkness light often proves a more effective 



* "The Western Saracens abstained not only from wine, but from 
all fermented and distilled drinks whatsoever, were as innocent of cof- 
fee as of tea and tobacco, knew opium only as a soporific medicine, 
and were inclined to abstemiousness in the use of animal food. Yet 
six millions of these truest sons of temperance held their own for 
seven centuries against great odds of heavy-armed Giaours, excelled all 
Christendom in astronomy, medicine, agriculture, chemistry, and lin- 
guistics, as well as in the abstract sciences, and could boast of a whole 
galaxy of philosophers and inspired poets."—*' International Review," 
December, 1880. 



SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. 107 

weapon than might or right. Even the limited light 
of human reason might help us to avoid mistakes that 
have undoubtedly retarded the triumph of our cause. 
"We must enlighten, as well as admonish, our children, 
if we would save them from the snares of the tempter ; 
among the victims of intemperance, even among those 
who can speak from experience, and can not deny 
that their poison has proved the curse of their lives, 
only a small portion is at all able to comprehend the 
necessary connection of cause and result. They 
ascribe their ruin to the spite of fortune, to the ma- 
chinations of an uncharitable world, to abnormally 
untoward circumstances, rather than to the normal 
effects of the insidious poison. Intoxication they 
admit to be an evil, but defend the moderate use of 
a liquor as infallibly injurious in the smallest as in 
the largest dose; they underrate the progressive tend- 
ency of their vice, and overrate their power of resist- 
ance; they cling to the tradition that alcohol, dis- 
creetly enjoyed, may prove a blessing instead of a 
curse. "We must banish that fatal delusion. We 
must reveal the true significance of the poison-habit 
before we can hope to suppress it as a lif e-blighting 
vice. Our text-books should be found in every col- 
lege and every village school from Florida to Oregon. 
Every normal school should graduate teachers of 
temperance. The law of the State of New York, 
providing for the introduction of primers on the ef- 
fects of alcoholic beverages, was attacked by one of 
our leading scientific periodicals, with more learning 
than insight, on the ground that the physiological 
action of alcohol is as yet obscure even to our ablest 



108 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

pathologists, and therefore not a fit subject for a com- 
mon school text-book. The same objection might be 
urged against every other branch of physiology and 
the natural history of the organic creation. " Every 
vital process is a miracle, 95 says Lorenz Oken, " that 
is, in all essential respects an unexplained phenome- 
non." A last question will always remain unanswered 
wherever the marvelous process of life is concerned, 
but our ignorance, as well as our knowledge, of that 
phenomenon has its limits, and, in regard to the ef- 
fects of alcoholic beverages, it is precisely the most 
knowable and most fully demonstrated part of the 
truth which it behooves every child to know, but of 
which at present nine tenths of the adults, even in 
the most civilized countries, remain as ignorant as the 
natives of Kamtschatka, who worship a divinity in 
the form of a poisonous toadstool. A boy may be 
brought to comprehend the folly of gambling even 
before he has mastered the abstruse methods of com- 
bination and permutation employed in the calculus 
of probable loss and gain. We need not study Ben- 
tham to demonstrate that honesty is an essential basis 
of commerce and social intercourse. By the standard 
of usefulness, too, temperance primers might well 
take precedence of many other text -books. Our 
schoolboys hear all sorts of things about the perils 
encountered by the explorers of African deserts and 
Arctic seas, but next to nothing about the pitfalls in 
their own path — no room for the discussion of such 
subjects in a curriculum that devotes years to the 
study of dead languages. Is the difference between 
the archaic and pliocene form of a Greek verb so 



SUBJECTIVE KEMEDIES. 109 

much more important than the difference between 
food and poison ? 

With such a text as the monster curse of intem- 
perance and its impressive practical lessons, a slight 
commentary would suffice to turn thousands of young 
observers into zealous champions of our cause, just as 
in Germany a few years of gymnastic training have 
turned nearly every young man into an advocate of 
physical education. The work begun in the school- 
room should be continued on the lecture platform, 
but we should not dissemble the truth that in a 
crowded hall ninety per cent of the visitors have gen- 
erally come to hear an orator rather than a teacher, 
and enjoy an eloquence that stirs up their barrenest 
emotions as much as if it had fertilized the soil of 
their intelligence, just as the unrepentant gamesters 
of a Swiss watering-place used to applaud the sensa- 
tional passages of a drama written expressly to set 
forth the evils of the gambling hell. Enthusiasm 
and impressiveness are valuable qualifications of a 
public speaker, but he should possess the talent of 
making those agencies the vehicles of instruction. The 
great mediaeval reformers, as well as certain political 
agitators of a later age, owe their success to their nat- 
ural or acquired skill in the act of stirring their hear- 
ers into an intellectual ferment that proved the leaven 
of a whole community — for that skill is a talent that 
can be developed on a basis of pure common sense, 
and should be more assiduously cultivated for the 
purposes of our reform. A modern philanthropist 
could hardly confer a greater benefit on his fellow- 
citizens than by founding a professorship of temper- 
10 



110 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

ance, or endowing a college with the special condition 
of a proviso for a weekly lecture on such topics as 
"The Stimulant Delusion," "Alcoholism," "The 
History of the Temperance Movement." 

Pamphlets, too, may subserve an important didac- 
tic purpose, and in the methods of their distribution 
we might learn a useful lesson from our adversaries, 
the manufacturers of alcoholic nostrums, w r ho intro- 
duce their advertisements into every household by 
publishing them combined with almanacs, comic illus- 
trations, note-books, etc., i. e., not only free, but 
winged with extra inducements to the recipient, and 
often by the special subvention of druggists and vil- 
lage postmasters — till quack annuals have almost 
superseded the old family calendars with their miscel- 
lanies of pious adages and useful recipes. Could we 
not retrieve the lost vantage-ground by the publica- 
tion of temperance year-books, compiled by a com- 
mittee of our best tract societies, and distributed by 
agents of the W. 0. T. U. — with inspiring conviction 
to emulate the zeal stimulated by a bribe of gratuitous 
brandy bottles ? 

Popular books must, above all, be interesting, and 
with a large plurality of readers that word is still a 
synonym of entertaining. A German bookseller esti- 
mates that the romances of Louisa Muhlbach have 
done more to familiarize her countrymen with the 
history of their fatherland than all historical text- 
books, annals, and chronicles taken together, and we 
should not despise the aid of the novelist, if he should 
possess the gift of making fiction the handmaid of 
truth, and the rarer talent of awakening the reflections 



SUBJECTIVE KEMEDIES. HI 

as well as the emotions of his readers, for all such 
appeals should prepare the way for the products of 
the temperance press proper, by which we should 
never cease to invoke the conscience and the reason 
of our fellow-men. (Appendix, VIII.) 

2. Proscription. — That union is strength is a truth 
which asserts itself even at the expense of public wel- 
fare, and in favor of those who combine to thwart the 
purposes of the law or prevent the progress of needed 
reforms. To the cabals of such adversaries, against 
whom the influence of moral suasion would be power- 
less, we should oppose weapons that would strike at 
the foundation of their strength, namely, the most 
effectual means to diminish the number of their allies. 
Many of those who are callous to the stings of con- 
science would hesitate to defy the stigma of public 
opinion ; others who are proof against all other argu- 
ments would yield if we could make it their com- 
mercial interest to withdraw their aid from the ene- 
mies of mankind. 

That the prescription of alcohol for remedial pur- 
poses will ultimately be abandoned, like bleeding, 
blue-pill dosing, and other medical anachronisms, is 
as certain as that the Carpathian peasants will cease 
to exorcise devils by burning cow-dung, and we can 
somewhat promote the advent of that time by patron- 
izing reform physicians in preference to "brandy- 
doctors," as Benjamin Hush used to call them, and 
by classing alcoholic "bitters" with the prohibited 
beverages. It is mere mockery to prohibit the sale 
of small beer and permit quacks to sell their brandy 
as a " digestive tonic," and obviate the inconveniences 



112 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

of the Sunday law by consigning their liquor to a 
drug-store. Does the new name or the admixture of 
a handful of herbs change the effects of the poison ? 
We might as well prohibit gambling and permit musi- 
cal lottery drawings under the name of sacred con- 
certs. Till we can do better we should permit drug- 
gists to sell alcoholic bitters only on the certified 
prescription of a responsible physician, all such pre- 
scriptions to be duly registered, and periodically re- 
ported to the Temperance Commissioner of a Board 
of Health. Nostrum-mongers will probably continue 
to fleece the ignorant to the end of time, but they 
must cease to decoy their victims by pandering to the 
alcohol-vice. 

3. Healthier Pastimes. — There is no doubt that 
a lack of better pastimes often tends to promote in- 
temperance. In thousands of our country towns, 
equidistant from rural sports and the amusements of 
the metropolis, ennui rather than ignorance * or nat- 
ural depravity leads our young men to the dram-shop, 
and, in recognizing that fact, we should not delude 
ourselves with the hope that reading-rooms alone could 
remedy the evil.f The craving after excitement^ in 

* " Education is the cure of ignorance," says Judge Pitman, " but 
ignorance is not the cause of intemperance. Men who drink generally 
know better than others that the practice is foolish and hurtful. . . . 
It is not the most earnest and intelligent workers in the sphere of 
public education that make their overestimate of it as a specific for 
intemperance. While they are fully sensible of that measure of indi- 
rect aid which intellectual culture brings to all moral reforms, they 
feel how weak is this agency alone to measure its strength against the 
powerful appetite for drink." 

f " In a primitive state of society field-sports afford abundant pas- 



SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. 113 

some form or other, is an instinct of human nature 
which may be perverted, but can never be wholly 
suppressed, and, in view of the alternative, we would 
find it cheaper — both morally and materially — to 
gratify that craving in the comparatively harmless 
way of the Languedoc peasants (who devote the even- 
ing hours to singing contests, trials of skill, round 
dances, etc.), or after the still better plan of the an- 
cient Greeks. Antiquity had its Olympic games, 
Nemean and Capitoline arenas, circenses, and local 
festivals. The Middle Ages had their tournaments, 
May days, archery contests, church festivals, and guild 
feasts. The Latin nations still find leisure for pas- 
times of that sort, though in modified, and not always 
improved, forms ; but in Great Britain, Canada, and 
the United States, with their six times twelve hours 
of monotonous factory- work, and Sunday laws against 
all kinds of recreations, the dreariness of existence 
has reached a degree which for millions of working- 
men has made oblivion a blest refuge, and there is 
no doubt that many dram-drinkers use alcohol as an 

times, our wealthy burghers find indoor amusements, and scholars have 
ideal hunting-grounds of their own ; but the large class of our fellow- 
citizens, to whom reading is a task rather than a pleasure, are reduced 
to the hard choice between their circenses and their panes. Even the 
slaves of ancient Rome had their saturnalia, when their masters in- 
dulged them in the enjoyment of their accumulated arrears of happi 
ness ; but our laborers toil like machines, whose best recreation is a 
temporary respite from work. Human hearts, however, will not re- 
nounce their birthright to happiness ; and, if joy has departed this life, 
they pursue its shadow in the land of dreams, and try to spice the dry 
bread of daily drudgery with the sweets of delirium." — " International 
Review," December, 1880. 



114 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

anodyne — the most available palliative against the 
misery of life-weariness. We would try in vain to 
convert such men by reproofs or ostracism. Before 
we can persuade them to renounce their excursions 
to the land of delirium, the realities of life must be 
made less unendurable. They know the dangers of 
intemperance, but consider it a lesser evil.* They 
know no other remedy. Hence their bitter hatred of 
those who would deprive them of that only solace. 
Shall we resign such madmen to their fate ? I am 
afraid that their type is represented by a larger class 
than current conceptions might incline us to admit. 
Let those who would verify those conceptions visit a 
popular beer-garden — not as emissaries of our propa- 
ganda, but as neutral observers. Let them use a suita- 
ble opportunity to turn the current of conversation 
upon a test topic — " Personal Liberty," " The Sunday 
Question," " Progress of the Prohibition Party." Let 
the observer retain his mask of neutrality, and ascer- 
tain the views — the private views — of a few specimen 
topers. Do they deny the physiological tendencies 
of their practice? The correlation of alcohol and 
crime? They avoid such topics. ]STo, nine out of 
ten will prefer an unanswerable or unanswered argu- 
ment ; the iniquity of interfering with the amuse- 
ments of the poor, with the only available recreations 

* " But, beside their excitative influence, strong stimulants induce 
a lethargic reaction; and it is for the sake of this after effect that 
many unfortunates resort to intoxication. They drink in order to get 
drunk ; they are not tempted by the poison-fiend in the guise of a good, 
familiar spirit, but deliberately invoke the enemy which steals away 
their brains." — "International Review," December, 1880. 



SUBJECTIVE EEMEDIES. 115 

of the less privileged classes. Take that away and 
what can a man do who has no better pastimes, and 
can not always stay at home ? "What shall he do with 
sixteen hours of leisure ? 

The question then recurs : How shall we deal 
with such men ? How reclaim them sufficiently even 
for the nobler purposes of the present life, not to 
speak of higher aims? How save them from the 
road that leads down to death ? A change of heart 
may now and then work wonders, even the wonder 
of a permanent reform ; but we have no right to rely 
on constant miracles, and for thousands in sorest need 
of help there is only one practical solution of the 
problem : Let us provide an opportunity of better 
pastimes — not as a concession to our enemies, hut as 
the most effectual method to counteract the attraction 
of their snares, and deprive them of the only plausible 
argument against the tendencies of our reform. We 
need not profane the Sabbath by bull-fights. We 
need not tempt the poor to spend their wages on rail- 
way excursions or the gambling tables of a popular 
summer resort. But we should recognize the neces- 
sity of giving them once a week a chance for outdoor 
amusements, and unless we should prefer the Swedish 
compromise plan of devoting the evening of the Sab- 
bath to earthly purposes, we should adopt the sug- 
gestion of the Chevalier Bunsen, and amend the eight 
hour law by a provision for a free Saturday after- 
noon. Half a day a week, together with the evenings 
of the long summer days, would suffice where the 
means of recreation are near at hand. Even the 
smallest factory villages could afford a little pleasure 



116 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

ground of their own, a public garden with a free 
gymnasium, a foot-race track, ball ground, a tennis- 
hall or nine-pin alley, for the winter season, a free 
bath, and a few zoological attractions. In larger 
towns we might add free music, a restaurant man- 
aged on the plan of Susanna Dodds, M. D.,* and 
perhaps a museum of miscellaneous curiosities. Such 
pleasure resorts should be known as Temperance Gar- 
dens. They would redeem as many drunkards as all 
our prisons and inebriate asylums taken together; 
they would do more : they would prevent drunken- 
ness. And, above all, they would accustom the work- 
ing classes to associate the name of Temperance with 
the conceptions of liberality, manliness, cheerfulness, 
and recreation, instead of — well, their present mis- 
conceptions. We might arrange monthly excursions, 
and the happiest yearly festival would be a Deliver- 
ance Feast ; an anniversary of the day when the city 
or village decided to free itself from the curse of the 
poison-traffic. Like some of the Turner halls of the 
German gymnasts, temperance gardens could be made 
more than self-supporting by charging a small admis- 
sion fee to the spectator-seats of the gymnasium, and 
selling special refreshments at a moderate advance on 
the cost price. The surplus might be invested in 
prizes to stimulate competition in such gymnastics as 
wrestling, running, and hammer throwing (" putting 
the club," as the Scotch highlanders call it), with re- 
served days, or arenas, for juvenile competitors. In 
winter we might vary the programme by archery, 

* Author of "Health in the Household." 



SUBJECTIVE EEMEDIES. 117 

singing contests, and trials of skill in various domes- 
tic fashions, with an occasional " spelling bee " — at 
least for those who could be trusted to consider it a 
pastime rather than a task, for the purpose of recre- 
ation should not be sacrificed even to considerations 
of utility. In regard to athletics, that apprehension 
would be superfluous ; the enthusiasm of gymnastic 
emulation has exerted its power at all times and among 
all nations, and needs but little encouragement to re- 
vive in its old might. It would make the Temper- 
ance Garden what the Tillage Green was to the ar- 
chers of Old England, what the palaestra was to the 
youth of ancient Greece. It would supersede vicious 
pastimes ; it would regenerate the manhood of the 
tempted classes, and thus react on their personal and 
social habits ; they would satisfy their craving for 
excitement in the arena, they would learn to prefer 
mechanical to chemical stimulants.* Physical and 
moral vigor would go hand in hand. (Appendix, IX.) 
The union of temperance and athletic education 
has, indeed, been the ideal of many social reformers, 
from Pythagoras to Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the 
secret of their failure was a mistake that has defeated 
more than one philanthropic project. They failed to 
begin their reform at the basis of the social structure. 
He who fears the hardships of such a beginning lacks, 
after all, true faith in the destiny of his mission. Per- 
severance and uncompromising loyalty to tenets of 

* I can not help thinking that most of our fashionable diseases 
might be cured mechanically instead of chemically, by climbing a bitter- 
wood tree, or chopping it down, if you like, rather than swallowing a 
decoction of its disgusting leaves." — Boerhaave. 



118 THE POISON PEOBLEM. 

our covenant is to us a duty, as well as the best policy, 
for as a moral offense treason itself would not be more 
unpardonable than doubt in the ultimate triumph of a 
cause like ours. There is a secret which almost seems 
to have been better known to the philosophers and 
patriots of antiquity than to this unheroic age of our 
own, namely, that in the arena of moral contests a 
clearly undeserved defeat is a step toward victory. In 
that warfare the scales of fate are not biased by a pre- 
ponderance of gold or iron. Tyrants have reached 
the term of their power if they have made deliverance 
more desirable than life ; the persuasive power of 
Truth is increased by oppression ; and if the interests 
of a cause have become an obvious obstacle in the 
road of progress and happiness the promoters of that 
cause have to contend with a law that governs the 
tendencies of the moral as well as the physical uni- 
verse, and inexorably dooms the unfit to perish.* The 
unmasked enemies of mankind have no chance to 
prosper. (Appendix, X.) 

And, even where their disguises still avail them 
amidst the ignorance of their victims, we should re- 
member the consolation of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 
in his address to the Polish patriots: "They have 
swallowed you, but you can prevent them from as- 

* " The ultimate issue of the struggle is certain. If any one doubts 
the general preponderance of good over evil in human nature, he has 
only to study the history of moral crusades. The enthusiastic energy 
and self-devotion with which a great moral cause inspires its soldiers 
always have prevailed, and always will prevail, over any amount of 
self-interest or material power arrayed on the other side." — Goldwin 
Smith. 



SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. 119 

similating you." Our enemies may prevent the re- 
covery of their spoil, they may continue to devour 
the produce of our fields and of our labor, but we do 
not propose to let them enjoy their feast in peace ; 
whatever their gastric capacity, it will be our own 
fault if we do not cause them an indigestion that will 
diminish their appetite. " All the vile elements of 
society are against us," writes one of our lecturers, 
" but I have no fear of the event if we do not cease 
to agitate the subject," and we would, indeed, not 
deserve success if we should relax our efforts before 
we have secured the co-operation of every friend of 
justice and true freedom. 

It is true, we invite our friends to a battle-field, 
but there are times when war is safer than peace, and 
leads to the truer peace of conscience. The highest 
development of altruism inspires a devotion to the 
welfare of mankind that rewards itself by a deliver- 
ance from the petty troubles and vexations of daily 
life ; nay, all personal sorrows may thus be sunk out 
of sight, and those who seek release from grief for 
the inconstancy of fate, for the frustration of a cher- 
ished project, for the loss of a dear friend, may find 
a peace which fortune can neither give nor take away 
by devoting themselves to a cause of enduring prom- 
ise, to the highest abiding interest of their fellow-men. 
At the dawn of history that highest aim would have 
been : security against the inroads of barbarism. In 
the night of the Middle Ages : salvation from the 
phantoms of superstition. To-day it should be : de- 
liverance from the curse of the poison-vice. 

That deliverance will more than compensate all 



120 THE POISON PEOBLEM. 

sacrifices. Parties, like individuals, are sometimes des- 
tined to conquer without a struggle ; but the day of 
triumph is brighter if the powers of darkness have 
been forced to yield step for step, and we need not 
regret our labors, our troubles, nor even the disap- 
pointment of some minor hopes, for in spite of the 
long night we have not lost our way, and the waning 
of the stars often heralds the morning. 



APPENDIX. 



I. (Page 24:.) Even in the wine countries of 
Southern Europe. "I saw men, women, and chil- 
dren sitting in rows," Professor Delavan writes from 
Pome, " swilling away at wine, making up in quan- 
tity what was wanting in strength; and such was 
the character of the inmates of those dens that my 
guide urged my immediate departure, as I valued my 
life." 

"In regard to temperance," says Mr. Hillard 
(" Six Months in Italy "), " I am inclined to think 
that the inhabitants of Southern Italy, and the wine- 
making countries generally, enjoy a reputation some- 
what beyond their deserts. ... If the proportion of 
cases of stabbing brought to the Poman hospitals, 
which occur in or near wine-shops, I have no question 
that it would furnish a strong fact wherewith to point 
the exhortations of a temperance lecturer." 

II. (Page 34.) " Nature will have her revenge, 
and, when the most ordinary and harmless recreations 
are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in 
indulgences which no moralist would be willing to con- 
done. The charge brought against the Novatians in 

11 



122 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

the early days of the Church can, with equal plausi- 
bility, be brought against the Puritans in our own 
day. One vice, at all events, which Christians of 
every school, as well as non-Christian moralists, are 
agreed in condemning, is reputed to be a special op- 
probrium of Scotland ; and the strictest observance of 
all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regula- 
tions referred to has been found compatible with 
consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited 
assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does 
not cheer." (" Saturday Keview," July 19, 1879, p. 75.) 
III. (Page 49.) Even under the crucial circum- 
stances mentioned in Dr. Hargreaves's Temperance 
Anecdotes (" Alcohol and Man," pages 97 and 135) : 
" Among the crews of the late English Arctic Expe- 
dition there was a number of noble fellows who dared 
to meet the icy rigors of the North Pole in the well- 
tried armor of total abstinence. The total abstainers 
were six: William Malley, Adam Ayles, William 
Gore, Joiner, and Self, of the ship Alert, and Henry 
Petty of the ship Discovery. Ayles, Malley, Gore, 
and Petty were Good Templars, and all, except Gore, 
were true to their colors to the end. Joiner had been 
a total abstainer for eighteen years, and Self for twen- 
ty-one years, but neither were Good Templars. Both 
took drink during the toilsome sledge-journeys. The 
only men in the Alert that did sledge-work worthy of 
remark were Malley, Ayles, Joiner, and Self, the 
rest of the crew, including Gore, having all suffered 
disease and exhaustion. When the sledging - work 
closed, at the end of July, it was found that the few 
abstainers of the Alert had surpassed all the remain- 



APPENDIX. 123 

der of the crew in the number of days' sledging per- 
formed. Malley had been out ninety-nine days, and 
Ayles one hundred and ten days. It is a fact worthy 
of note that neither of these men was attacked with 
scurvy, but enjoyed good health, being only weakened 
by their arduous duties in sledging, which is said to 
be the hardest work ever imposed upon man. Each 
man had a design painted on canvas upon his back, to 
attract the attention of those following, in order to 
prevent snow-blindness. The Good Templars had 
the Grand Lodge Seal of the I. O. of G. T. painted 
on theirs. It was agreed that he who went farthest 
should leave his behind. Adam Ayles accomplished 
that feat, and buried the Good Templar's seal in a 
cavern nearer the North Pole than any human being 
has yet gone." 

Bruce, the heroic explorer of Eastern Africa, tested 
the efficacy of total abstinence with equal success un- 
der the opposite extremes of climatic vicissitudes — in 
the glowing sands of the Soudan and the icy summit- 
regions of the Abyssinian highlands. " I laid it down 
as a positive rule of health," says he, " that spirits and 
all fermented liquors should be regarded as poisons, 
and, for fear of temptation, not to carry them along 
with you, except as a menstruum for outward applica- 
tion. Spring or running water, if you can find it, is 
to be your only drink." 

Waterton, the zoological explorer of the South 
American virgin-woods, was a consistent abstainer, 
not from alcoholic tipples only, but from the tonic 
brandies which our nostrum-mongers would make us 
consider the safest antidote of malarious climates. 



124 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

" I eat moderately," says he, " and never drink wine, 
spirits, or any fermented liquors in any climate. This 
abstemiousness has ever proved a faithful friend." 

Dr. Livingstone (in 1862) writes from Zululand : 
" I lived on the principle of total abstinence from all 
alcoholic liquors for more than twenty years. The 
most severe labors or privations may be undergone 
without alcoholic stimulants." 

On the occasion of a monthly review (at Calcutta) 
Sir Charles Napier addressed his soldiers as follows : 
" Let me give you a bit of advice. Don't drink. 
Give rum a wide berth. I know that young fellows 
don't think much about advice from old ones. They 
put their tongue in their cheek and think they know 
a good deal better than the old cove who is giving 
them the benefit of his experience. But rely on it, if 
you drink you are done for. You will either be in- 
valided or die." 

" In Western Nubia," says Professor Blackhouse, 
" I have traveled over sand so hot that the very dogs 
who trod it howled with pain, and where the water 
was so bad that we had to conceal its taste with coffee. 
Yet there is no single act of my life to which I look 
back with greater satisfaction than to the adoption of 
total abstinence." 

" From my own knowledge," says the author of 
"Tropical Diseases," "as well as from the observation 
of others, I aver that those who drink nothing but water, 
or make it their principal drink, are but little affected 
by the climate, can undergo the greatest fatigue with- 
out inconvenience, and are not subject to troublesome 
or dangerous diseases." 



APPENDIX. 125 

Dr. Arthur Jackson, a veteran surgeon of the Brit- 
ish army, records his personal experience in the tropi- 
cal coast-lands of India and Southern Africa : " I have 
wandered a good deal about all parts of the world ; 
my health has been tried in all ways, and by the aid 
of temperance and hard work I have worn out two 
armies in two w^ars, and probably could wear out 
another, before my period of old age arrives in ear- 
nest. I eat no animal food, drink no wine or malt 
liquors, or spirits of any kind." 

Professor H. Marshall, Deputy Inspector of Army 
Hospitals, said before a Parliamentary committee : 
" In all climates the temperate are least affected by 
fatigues. Personal experience has taught me that the 
use of ardent spirits is not necessary to enable a Eu- 
ropean to undergo the fatigues of marching in a torrid 
climate. So far from being calculated to assist the 
human body in undergoing fatigues, I have always 
found that the strongest liquors were the most ener- 
vating, and this in whatever quantity they were con- 
sumed." 

Dr. Ward writes from Sumatra : " I have had the 
opportunity of observing for twenty years the com- 
parative effects of the use of spirituous liquors and 
less stimulating drinks by different classes of the na- 
tives, and I find that while the former expose them- 
selves with impunity to every degree of heat, cold, 
and wet, the latter can endure neither wet nor cold for 
even a short period, without danger to their health." 

" I am indebted to a gracious Providence for pres- 
ervation in every unhealthy climate," says Sir W. F. 
Williams, the defender of Kars ; " but I am satisfied 



126 THE POISON PEOBLEM. 

that a resolution, early formed and steadily persevered 
in, never to take spirituous liquors, has been the means 
of my escaping diseases by which multitudes have 
fallen around me. Had not the Turkish army of Kars 
been literally a ' cold-water army,' I am persuaded 
that they would never have performed the achieve- 
ments which crowned them with glory." 

IV. (Page 51.) " Before total abstinence had 
been tried to any great extent in England," says Dr. 
Hargreaves, " it was ascertained that the hardest work- 
ing men w r ere those who forged ship anchors. They 
were besides exposed to great extremes of heat and 
cold, and their employers allowed them an unlimited 
amount of strong beer. Dr. Beddoes proposed to the 
men that six of them should only drink water for one 
week, while six others should continue their usual 
allowance of beer. The men seemed astonished at 
such a proposition. ' Why, you want to kill us ! ' they 
exclaimed. i Do you for a moment suppose it possi- 
ble that we can endure such fatigue, that we can weld 
a ship's anchor and only drink water ? Tou must 
surely intend to ruin us.' ' No,' said the doctor, ' I 
have no such intention. I am a physician, and shall 
carefully watch the progress, so that no injury shall 
happen to you. I will put down fifty pounds. Try 
water for one week ; if you succeed, the fifty pounds 
are yours ; if not, I shall put them back in my pocket.' 
They at last agreed to the proposition. The two sets 
of men were pretty much alike during the first day of 
the trial; the second day the water drinkers com- 
plained less of fatigue than the others ; the third day 
the difference was more apparent, and on Saturday 



APPENDIX. 127 

night the water-drinkers confessed that they never 
felt so well in all their lives as they had felt that par- 
ticular week." While Tom Sawyers, the English 
pugilist, was under training, a gentleman once said to 
him : " Well, Tom, of course, in training you must 
take a good deal of nourishment, such as beefsteak, 
Barclay's stout, or ale ? " " I'll tell you what it is, 
sir," said Tom, " I am no teetotaler, and in my time 
have drunk a good deal — more than was good for me ; 
but when I've any business on hand there's nothing 
like water and dumb-bells." Weston, the pedestrian, 
who has walked over five hundred miles in six days, 
when asked if he did not take any stimulants, an- 
swered if he had taken any alcoholic drinks he would 
have lost his wager. The only use he made of alco- 
hol was to rub his feet with when they became ten- 
der.' 

" Alcohol," says Liebig, " by its effect on the nerv- 
ous system, merely enables the laborer to make up 
deficient power at the expense of his body ; to con- 
sume to-day that quantity of strength which ought 
naturally to have been employed to-morrow. He 
draws, so to speak, a bill on his bank of health, which 
must be always renewed, because, for want of means, 
he can not take it up. He consumes his capital in- 
stead of his interest, and the inevitable result is the 
final bankruptcy of a total collapse." 

"A moderate dose of beer or wine," says Dr. 
William Brunton, " would, in most cases, at once di- 
minish the maximum weight which a healthy person 
could lift. Mental acuteness, accuracy of perception, 
and delicacy of senses, are all so far opposed by alco- 



128 THE POISON PKOBLEM. 

hoi that the maximum efforts of each are incompati- 
ble with the indigestion of any moderate quantity of 
fermented liquors." 

V. (Page 55.) " It is unanimously admitted," 
says the Paris "Constitutional," "that the habit of 
drunkenness has increased in France year by year 
since the beginning of the century. In all directions 
its increase is remarked, and complaints are made of 
the disastrous effects which it produces on public 
health, as well as on public morality. The habitues 
of the taverns and the wine-cellars lose all inclination 
for work ; they desert their workshops during several 
days of the week, and the gains of the other days are 
devoted entirely to the indulgence of their passion for 
drink. Family-life is neglected ; all idea of saving is 
entirely abandoned. Those drunkards who are mar- 
ried and fathers of families take no trouble to satisfy 
the most urgent wants of their wives and children. 
The money that should supply the household passes 
into the hands of the tavern-keeper. Often, besides, 
the misconduct of the husband leads to the miscon- 
duct of the wife. Despairing of finding any comfort 
in her home, she seeks for some kind of compensation 
out of doors. As for the drunkard himself, it is for- 
tunate if he becomes merely idle and neglectful of his 
domestic obligations. His moral corruption often 
goes further. The tavern is a school of vice. ... It 
is also well known that the habit of drinking ruins 
the health, that it renders many diseases more danger- 
ous, and is the direct origin of many others. The 
French race is deteriorating daily. The drunkenness 
caused by wine would be less dangerous, hut unhap- 



APPENDIX. 129 

pilymen who begin with wine soon crave for stronger 
stimulants. The passage from one to the other is 
rapid. Alcohol is taken. In forty years the con- 
sumption of alcohol has tripled in France. From 
350,000 hectolitres in 1820 it increased to 620,000 in 
1850, and to 976,000 in 1868. These are the amounts 
on which duty was paid, and to these must be added 
all that escaped the customs officers." 

" Our impression is," says the editor of the San 
Francisco "Pacific " (April 15, 1872), " that the lowest, 
slowest, most illiterate, most unimpressible, most un- 
improvable, if not most vicious population of this 
State " (California) " outside of the great cities, is 
found in the oldest wine districts, and that the use of 
the product of vineyards has been the most active 
cause of this condition of the population ; that the in- 
creased production and consumption of wine on this 
coast, in the more recent years, has diminished the use 
of neither distilled liquors nor lager beer, but rather 
increased the demand for both. We never hear of 
people who forsake liquors and beer for the sake of 
wine j but we hear of many who never used an in- 
toxicant till they learned to love wine, and then 
have abandoned wine for something more stimulating. 
In a word, we do not believe that wines reform any- 
body, and we do believe that they beguile many into 
drinking habits, and finally into drunkenness, who 
would never have drunk a drop, but for wine." 

" I advise no settler in this State to make wine," 
says Charles Nordhoff. " He runs too many risks with 
children and laborers, even if he himself escapes. 
... I remember a wine-cellar . . . and on a pleasant, 



130 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

sunny afternoon, around these casks, a group of tipsy 
men — hopeless, irredeemable beasts — with nothing 
much to do but to encourage each other to another 
glass, and to wonder at the Eastern man, who would 
not drink. There were two or three Indians stagger- 
ing about the door; there were swearing and filthy 
talk inside ; there was a pretentious tasting of this 
or that other cask by a parcel of sots, who in their 
hearts would have preferred 'forty-rod whisky.' And 
a little way off there was a house with women and 
children, who had only to look out of the door to see 
this miserable sight, of husband, father, friends, visit- 
ors, and the hiredmen, spending the afternoon in 
getting drunk." 

" The Convention " (of Congregational ministers) 
" struck a strong blow for the temperance cause, 55 
writes Rev. Dr. Stone, " by declaring in unequivocal 
terms against the manufacture and use of wine. This 
was a point upon which I will confess I had not pre- 
viously a clear conviction. I had entertained a sort 
of hope that the manufacture of pure wines and their 
introduction into general use would crowd out the 
gross, strong liquors and diminish intemperance. I 
am now fully convinced that this hope was ground- 
less and delusive. It appears that in the wine-grow- 
ing districts intemperance is on the increase, extending 
even to the youth of both sexes. There is no way 
but to take ground against the production of grapes 
for all such purposes. This touches a very large and 
growing pecuniary interest, and will provoke strenu- 
ous opposition, but we must save this State, if it can be 
done, from such investment of capital and labor, and 



APPENDIX. 131 

from the unavoidable increase of drunkenness, profli- 
gacy, and crime." 

" The idea entertained in the establishment of free 
beer-shops," said the London " Times " in 1871, "was 
that the increased sale of beer would gradually w r ean 
men from the temptations of the regular tavern, 
would promote the consumption of a wholesome 
national beverage in place of ardent spirits, would 
break down the monopoly of the old license-houses, 
and impart, in short, a better character to the whole 
trade. . . . The result of this experiment did not con- 
firm the expectation of its promoters. The sale of 
beer was increased, but the sale of spirituous liquors 
was not diminished." " The new beer bill," wrote 
Sidney Smith, in 1831, " has begun its operation. 
Everybody is drunk. Those who are not singing are 
sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly 
state." 

The report of a Parliamentary committee declares 
that, "among the direct causes of our national in- 
temperance, one of the foremost and most prolific is 
the operation of the legislative act which called free 
beer-shops into existence." In a summary of more 
than two thousand paragraphs, the committee states : 

" 87. Beer-shops the curse of the country." 

" 88. Intemperance, especially among young men, 
has much increased since beer-shops were introduced 
some years ago." 

" 100. Intemperance, w T here decreased previous, 
has increased since enactment of the beer-shop law." 

" 112. One of the most demoralizing acts of late 
years." 



132 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

" I have no doubt," says the District Attorney of 
Worcester County, Massachusetts, " that the beer-traf- 
fic is adverse to the enforcement of the liquor law. I 
do not well understand how the friends of that law can 
hope to enforee it where the exemption of beer af- 
fords a cover." 

And a witness from Essex County : " I am inclined 
to believe that beer not only creates an appetite for 
something stronger, but that its immediate influence 
and eifect upon some is more dangerous to the com- 
munity than that of the stronger liquors, which are 
liable to make men drunk and helpless, while beer in- 
toxicates just enough to excite men to acts of vio- 
lence and crime." 

YL (Page 74.) Twenty years ago Dr. Young, 
Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, estimated the annual 
consumption in the United States to be at least 
220,000,000 gallons, and the cost about $600,000,000. 
" These figures," he says, " ought to be a sufficient 
argument. Six hundred million dollars ! The minds 
of few persons can comprehend this vast sum which 
is worse than wasted every year. It would pay for 
100,000,000 barrels of flour, averaging two and a half 
barrels to every man, woman, and child in the coun- 
try. This flour, if placed in wagons, ten barrels in 
each, would require 10,000 teams, which, allowing 
eight yards to each, would extend 45,455 miles — 
nearly twice round the earth, or half way to the 
moon. If the sum were in one dollar notes, it would 
take one hundred persons one year to count them. 
If spread on the surface of the ground, so that no 
spaces should be left between the notes, they would 



APPENDIX. 133 

cover 20,466 acres, forming a parallelogram of six by 
more than five miles, the walk around it being more 
than twenty-two miles." It was then hoped that the 
poison-deluge had reached its highest flood-mark (the 
great increase of the last decade being ascribed to the 
demoralizing influences of the war, etc.), but, since 
1866, the yearly aggregate of all liquors consumed has 
increased at a rate even exceeding that of our rapid 
growth in population. 

VII. (Page 95.) " It is a profound observation," 
says Judge Sprague, " that the morality of no people 
can be maintained above the morality of their laws. 
Their institutions are an index of their sentiments. 
Reason, observation, and history all teach this. While 
gambling-houses were licensed in Paris and ]STew Or- 
leans, that vice could not there be made disgraceful ; 
and where prostitution, even, has been licensed, as in 
some parts of Europe, it has there been viewed in a 
very different light from the abhorrence with which 
we regard it. Where polygamy is lawful, a plurality of 
wives is reputable. If we recur to the history of 
Rome, we learn that public brothels were there toler- 
ated with the inscription i Hie habitat felicitas' 
glaring upon their front, as may even now be seen in 
the ruins of Pompeii ; and, at the same time, public 
exhibitions of mortal combats by gladiators, and of 
human victims thrown to wild beasts, were common 
amusements of the people. And what was the effect 
upon morals and manners? A combination of the 
extremes of luxurious license and ferocious barbarism. 
The laws of a country may reconcile public sentiment 
to crimes, even the most abhorrent to our nature, to 
12 



134: THE POISON PROBLEM. 

murder itself — nay, to the murder of one's own off- 
spring. Where infanticide is allowed, people look 
on and see parents destroy their own children, not 
only without remonstrance, but without emotion. . . . 
Extraordinary efforts, or the impulses of a particular 
occasion, may, for a time, carry up public sentiment 
to an elevation above that of legal institutions, but 
the laws must either be changed to come up to public 
opinion, or public opinion will be brought down to 
a level with the laws.' 1 

" It is plain to me as the sun in a clear summer 
sky," says Dr. Humphrey, of Amherst College, " that 
the license laws of our country constitute one of the 
main pillars on which the stupendous fabric of intem- 
perance now rests." 

And Senator Frelinghuysen adds : " If men wdll 
engage in this destructive traffic, if they will stoop 
to degrade their reason and reap the wages of iniquity, 
let them no longer have the law-book as a pillow, nor 
quiet their conscience with the opiate of a court- 
license." 

" The point to be decided by the Legislature of 
these United States," says Dr. Justin Edwards in his 
" Sixth Report of the American Temperance Society," 
" to be decided for all coming posterity, is, Shall the 
sale of ardent spirits as a drink be treated in legisla- 
tion as a virtue or as a vice ? Shall it be licensed, 
sanctioned by law, and perpetuated to roll its all-per- 
vading curses onward interminably, or shall it be 
treated as it is, in truth, a sin ? " 

" An evil always becomes worse by being sustained 
by the laws of the land," says the Rev. Albert Barnes. 



APPENDIX. 135 

" This fact does much to discourage others in oppos- 
ing the evil, and endeavoring to turn public indigna- 
tion against it. It is an unwelcome thing for a good 
man ever to set himself against the laws of the land, 
and denounce that as wrong which they affirm to be 
right." 

The Hon. Woodbury Davis, of the Supreme Court 
of Maine, admits that " one of the most valuable re- 
sults of prohibitive laws is their effect on public senti- 
ment in making it disreputable to drink, and in re- 
straining men from a practice in which they could 
not indulge, except by doing it secretly, which they 
do not like to do ; and therefore, aside from its direct 
influence, perhaps its most valuable work was in mak- 
ing the use of liquor disgraceful, and thereby restrain- 
ing the young from the habit." 

" License-laws," says Judge Pitman, "carry to the 
popular mind the implication that, although the traffic 
in intoxicants is an exceptional one, requiring some 
special safeguards, yet that there is a legitimate public 
demand for such liquors as an ordinary beverage, 
which the State is bound to allow adequate means to 
supply. On the other hand, prohibitory laws as 
plainly declare that the sale of intoxicating liquors as 
a beverage supplies no legitimate want, and is fraught 
with such dire results to the State as to justify and 
require its suppression. What is so dangerous to the 
State can hardly be deemed safe to the citizen, and 
the natural sequence of prohibition is total abstinence. 
Suppose, instead of license or strict prohibition, the 
State adopts some i half-way measure.' If, for in- 
stance, under a system of ' local option, 5 what is crim- 



136 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

inal in the country becomes innocent in the city, does 
it not tend to the confusion of moral distinctions? 
Will it not inevitably lead the thoughtless to practi- 
cally feel, if not to theoretically believe, that, in drink- 
ing, as in other things, a different standard of conduct 
is permissible in the one place from that in the other ? 
Or, suppose the law undertakes to discriminate be- 
tween the different kinds of alcoholic beverages, allow- 
ing, for instance, the sale of malt liquors and prohibit- 
ing that of distilled spirits, is there not plainly, beyond 
the enticement offered to the use of the beers by their 
free public exposure and sale, a most impressive and, 
at the same time, as we believe, a most dangerous 
advertisement of them by the State itself as harmless 
beverages? The force of these considerations, as to 
the weight which law has in the popular mind, in 
matters of opinion and conduct, will be more and 
more apparent to the reader upon reflection. It may 
be that the influence of law in the formation of opin- 
ion, and the regulation of human conduct in matters 
beyond its domain of positive rule, is excessive. It is 
true that a right and wise-minded man will find a 
more unerring external and internal standard for the 
regulation of his moral belief and his conduct than 
that of statute-law ; but it is a profound remark of 
George Eliot that, 'to judge wisely, I suppose we 
must know how things appear to the unwise; that 
kind of appearance making the larger part of the 
world's history.' Soon after the enactment of the 
present license-law in Massachusetts, I was holding a 
term of court, when a deputy-sheriff said to me one 
morning, ' I have just seen a sad sight — a fellow per- 



APPENDIX. 137 

suading a reluctant comrade to enter a grog-shop. 
" Come along," said he, " this is now as respectable a 
place as any; the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
says so." ' But this immediate application of the stat- 
ute-law to override moral tastes and convictions is the 
coarser and less dangerous kind of the educational 
influence which bad laws exert. The greater danger 
is in the slower and more insidious influence which 
such laws exert in familiarizing us with public vice ; 
in accustoming us to its public tolerance ; in repress- 
ing the natural force of moral indignation ; and in 
inducing a faithless acquiescence in the inevitableness 
of moral evil. And, on the other hand, it is in ac- 
cordance with both philosophy and experience that 
the effect of prohibitory laws should be surely, if 
slowly, to discourage the formation of drinking-habits. 
It is a mistake to suppose that men often rush into 
evil courses in a spirit of moral defiance. When the 
State writes ' criminal ' over the doorway of the most 
elegant drinking-saloon, as well as over the lowest 
grog-shop; when it places at the bar of justice the 
tempter by the side of his victim ; and when it stamps 
every package of liquor as a dangerous beverage, mer- 
iting destruction as a public nuisance, it has done 
much to warn the young and unwary, and to turn 
their feet aside from the downward path." 

VIII. (Page 111.) " The Women's Christian Tem- 
perance Union has from the beginning believed that, 
in its battle with the drink curse, it must adopt the 
1 Do Everything Policy. 5 Into every nook and cor- 
ner of the awful darkness light must penetrate. • . . 
The drink-curse shields itself behind false theories of 



138 THE POISON PROBLEM. 

science, hence we must follow it into the schools, 
medical colleges included." — Frances E. "Willard. 

IX. (Page 117.) " Nobody wants to abolish our 
weekly day of rest. The only question is, how to 
make it worth as much as possible to those who need 
it most. . . . The example of Agassiz's Museum 
should not remain unimitated. Special penalties on 
Sunday recreations are in force throughout New Eng- 
land. This legislation does not trouble people who 
get all the diversion they wish, however expensive. 
But those who are so fortunate ought to put them- 
selves in the place of those who have been for six 
days in such a monotonous round of toil that they 
crave something new and bright to look at and think 
about. To deny it is to brutalize them, and predis- 
pose them to vice." — F. M. Holland, "The Poor 
Man's Sunday." 

X. (Page 118.) " The ultimate success of the 
struggle is certain. If any one doubts the general 
preponderance of good over evil in human nature, he 
has only to study the history of moral crusades. The 
enthusiastic energy and self-devotion with which a 
great moral cause inspires its soldiers always have pre- 
vailed, and always will prevail, over any amount of 
self-interest or material power arrayed on the other 
side." — Prof. Goldwin Smith. 



THE END. 



HEALTH BOOKS. 



Health Primers. Edited by J. Langdon Down, M. D., F.R. O.P. ; 
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I. Exercise and Training. 
II. Alcohol: Its Use and Abuse. 

III. Premature Death: Its Promo- 

tion or Prevention. 

IV. The House and its Surround- 

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Health and Disease. 

VI. Baths and Bathing. 

VII. The Skin and its Troubles. 

VIII. The Heart and its Func- 

IX. The Nervous System, [tions. 



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avoid those evils that have made her life a wretched failure."— From Introduction. 

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Physical Education ; or, The Health Laws of Nature. By Felix L. 
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The Management of Infancy, Physiological and Moral. Intended 
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Notes on Nursing. What It Is, and What It Is Not. By Florence 
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Hand-Book of Sanitary Information for Householders. 

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HEALTH BO OKS.— (Continued.) 



On Foods. By Edward Smith, M. D., LL. B., F. R. S., Fellow of the 
Royal College of Physicians of London, etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.75. 

44 The author extends the ordinary view of foods, and includes water and air, 
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of Dr. Smith's own experiments, possess a very high value/'— London Examiner. 

Health: a Hand-Book for Households and Schools. By Edward 
Smith, M. D. 12ino. Cloth, $1.00. 

44 . . . There is no doubt that much of the sickness with which humanity is 
afflicted is the result of ignorance, and proceeds from the use of improper food, 
from defective drainage, overcrowded rooms, ill- ventilated workshops, impure 
water, and other like preventable causes. Legislation and municipal regulations 
may do something in the line of prevention, but the people themselves can do a 
great deal more— particularly if properly enlightened ; and this is the purpose 
of the book."— Albany Journal. 

Emergencies, and How to Treat them. The Etiology, Pathology, 
and Treatment of Accidents, Diseases, and Cases of Poisoning, which 
demand Prompt Action. Designed for Students and Practitioners of 
Medicine. By Joseph W. Howe, M. D., Clinical Professor of Sur- 
gery in the Medical Department of the University of New York, etc. 
Third edition. 8vo. Cloth, $2.50. 

M . . .To tbe general practitioner in towns, villages, and in the country, 
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volume will be recognized as a valuable help. We commend it to the profession." 
—Cincinnati Lancet and Observer. 

Health, at Home. By A. H. Guernsey, and I. P. Davis, M. D., author 
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Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary De- 
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D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street, New York. 



WOMEN, PLUMBERS, AND DOCTORS; 

OR, HOUSEHOLD SANITATION. 
BY MRS. H. M. PLUNKETT. 

Showing that, if women and plumbers do their whole sanitary 

duty, there icill be comparatively little occasion for 

the services of the doctors. 

With 50 Illustrations - 12mo, cloth, $1.25. 



CHAPTER-HEADS. 

Hygienic Houses. Sewage and Plumbing. 

Under the House. Sewer Gas and Germs. 

Arrangement of the House. Overlooked Channels of Infection. 

Lighting the House. Our Neighbor's Premises. 

"Wholesome Water. Public Sanitation. 



"Here is a really profound and thorough investigation into the causes of half the 
diseases that afflict humanity. If dwellings were built in the right places, properly 
constructed and furnished, and then carefully looked after, sickness would rarely occur 
in such houses. Mrs. Plunkett cites numerous facts from the experience of 'herself 
and others to prove all she says. She tells many touching stories to illustrate the 
fatal results of ignorance and neglect of the laws of health in American homes. The 
book is very interesting, aside from its instructive and useful character. It is full of 
pictures showing the contrasts of good and bad plumbing, complete and defective 
drainage, etc. The reading of practical books like this one will do much to educate 
our people in the art of making homes healthy and happy. 1 '— New York Journal of 
Commerce. 

" After a few pages on sanitation in general. Mrs. Plunkett describes the dangers 
whi-h lurk in wet house-sites and inadequate foundations, and then proceeds with the 
arrangement of the house for securing sufficient warmth, ventilation, and sunshine. 
The next chapter deals with lighting, and contains mnny facts in relation to dan- 
gerous burning-oils that every housewife should thoroughly know. Various ways in 
which water may become unwholesome are told, with directions for tests and measures 
of protection. The requirements of a good system of plumbing are stated, examples 
of defective work are given, and some explanation of the nature of sewer-gas and 
disease-germs is added. As many eminent physicians have declared that cholera will 
certainly come to America in 1835, a memorandum of the New York State Beard of 
Health relating to the prevention of the disease has been introduced, together with 
directions for home treatment including recipes for medicines. The book, though 
aiming especially to interest women, is addressed to all readers who desire a popular 
and practical presentation of this important subject; quotations from the writings of 
able physicians and sanitarians have been freely used, and evidently care has been 
taken to make a useful and reliable book." — The Popular Science Monthly. 

"Mrs. H. M. Plunkett has written a book that will prove a blessing in thousands of 
households, if only its important lessons are heeded. She clearly shows why wemen 
should understand the details as well as the theory of sanitation, and furnishes all 
informatiou to enable them to possess such an understanding. 11 — Boston Home Jour- 
nal. 

"The work is well written, and the diagrams showing the perfect and imperfect 
work are simple and easily understood; it is well worth perusal by every father, and 
more particularly by every mother of a family, showing, as it does,' where most of the 
6eeds of disease germinate. 11 — Rochester Post and Express. 



For sale by all booksellers ; or sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price. 
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MAXIMS OF PUBLIC HEALTH. 

By 0. W. Wight, M. D., of the Detroit Board of Health. 16mo, cloth, 
To cents. 

" The appearance of this hand-hook is most timely. There is a vague appre- 
hension tliat the cholera may visit the United States next year. Everybody 
wants to know what to do fur the exclusion or limitation of the dread disease. 
Dr. O. W. Wight, to whom we owe these 'Maxims of Public Health, 1 speaks 
with the voice of authority. He has been for six years Health Officer of Detroit, 
and has made epidemics the subject of patient and earnest study. Here we have 
the fruits of all his experience and observation. His book ought to be placed in 
the hands of every person connected in any way with health boards in all parts 
of the country. It is invaluable for instant reference in an emergency. Dr. 
Wight proves his competency to speak on this subject by the emphasis he puts 
on cleanliness of houses and streets as the best safeguard against pestilence. " — 
New York Journal of Commerce. 

"Dr. Wight is to be commended; not only for reiterating the dangers to which 
we are sub;ect, both in city and country, from unsanitary surroundings, but 
because he has clothed his thoughts in virile, understandable English. He has 
the ordinary scientific view of filth as the breeder of certain contagious diseases 
— scarlet fever, typhoid fever, diphtheria and the like — but has a new idea con- 
cerning the removal of sewage before it putrefies. As he puts it in the preface, 
'the only way to get rid of sewer-gas is not to make any.' It is a pleasure to 
read his thoughts ; they can not be other than a great boon to the unprofessional 
man, for whom they are specially written."— Hartford Evening Fost. 

"The intelligent householder who has no time, perhaps no inclination, fop 
systematic studies, may re:id these maxims with a quick comprehension of their 
import, and find hints that will save himself and his loved ones unspeakable 
pain and sorrow. To say nothing of his success as a medical practitioner, Dr. 
Wight gives in this valuable book the result of six years of personal experience 
in sanitary administration. We heartily commend it to the careful reading of 
all who would be prepared to ward off any epidemic that should make its appear- 
ance in their midst, or who would have everything about their premises of the 
most healthful character."— Boston Home Journal. 

" Dr. Wight's heart is at his pen's point in every page of his book, and he is 
as exhaustive upon every phase of human life and sufiering and exposure and 
economy, as he is on the school."— ££. Paid Dispatch. 

"A little volume which condenses within less than two hundred pages a vast 
amount of sanitary science. . . . The book is evidently the result of long and 
close attention to the subject, and, being designed for the general reader, it gives 
the results of investigation and experiment without burdening them with de- 
tails of the processes by which they have been reached. It is a book which should 
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" This is a timely and most instructive as well as interesting series of para- 
graphs on sanitary subjects, which ought to be read in every household and 
board of health."— Newark Daily Advertiser. 

"He pierages into the subject of city drainage, handling the topic with euch 
skill and precision as prove him a past master of hygienic science. Every 
possible phase of house, stable, and city drainage, and sanitation, is explained 
and discussed."— Detroit Evening News. 



For sale by all booksellers ; or will be sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt 
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New York: D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street 



BOOKS FOR EVERY HOUSEHOLD. 



Cooley's Cyclopaedia of Practical Receipts, 

And Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures, Professions, and 
Trades, including Medicine, Pharmacy, and Domestic Economy. 
Designed as a Comprehensive Supplement to the Pharmacopoeia^ 
and General Book of Reference for the Manufacturer, Tradesman, 
Amateur, and Heads of Families. Sixth edition. Revised and 
partly rewritten by Richard V. Tuson, Professor of Chemistry 
and Toxicology in the Royal Veterinary College. Complete in 
two volumes, 8vo, 1,796 pages. With Illustrations. Price, $9.00. 

" The great characteristic of this work is its general usefalness. In covering 
inch diverse subjects, the very best and most recent research seems to have 
been sought for, and the work is remarkable for intelligent industry. This 
very complete work can, then, be highly recommended as fulfilling to the letter 
what it purports to be — a cyclopaedia of practical receipts." — New York Times. 

" It is a well-edited special work, compiled with excellent judgment for spe- 
cial purposes, which are kept constantly in mind. If it is more comprehensive 
than its title suggests, that is only because it is impossible to define the limits 
of its purpose with exactitude, or to describe its contents upon a titie-page. 
Illustrations of the text are freely used, and the mechanical execution of the 
work is excellent."— iVew York Evening Post. 

The Chemistry of Common Life. 

By the late Professor James F. W. Johnston. A new edition, revised 
and enlarged, and brought down to the Present Time, by Akthur 
Herbert Church, M. A., Oxon., author of " Food : its Sources, 
Constituents, and Uses." Illustrated with Maps and numerous 
Engravings on Wood. In one vol., 12mo, 592 pages. Cloth. 
Price, $2.00. 

Summary op Contents.— The Air we Breathe ; the Water we Drink ; the 
Soil we Cultivate ; the Plant we Rear ; the Bread we Eat ; the Beef we Cook ; 
the Beverages we Infuse ; the Sweets we Extract ; the Liquors we Ferment; the 
Narcotics we Indulge in; the Poisons we Select; the Odors we Enjoy; the 
Smells we Dislike ; the Colors we Admire ; What we Breathe and Breathe for; 
What, How, and Why we Digest ; the Body we Cherish ; the Circulation of 
Matter. 

In the number and variety of striking illustrations, in the simplicity of its 
etyle. and in the closeness and cogency of its arguments, Professor Johnston's 
44 Chemistry of Common Life " has as yet found no equal among the many books 
of a similar character which its success originated, ;*nd it steadily maintains its 
preeminence in the popular scientific literature of the day. In 'preparing this 
edition for the press, the editor had the opportunity of consulting Professor 
Johnston's private and corrected copy cf " The Chemistry of Common Life," 
Who had, before his death, gleaned very many fresh details* so that he was able 
not only to incorporate with his revision seme reallj valuable matter, but to 
le rn the kind of addition which the author contemplated. 



New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street 



